Goat-Footed Gods

The spirit of Pan, the goat-footed guardian of the forest, haunts Driskell’s fourth poetry collection (after Blue Etiquette) and appropriately so, since the poet’s native Kentucky countryside serves as a major wellspring of inspiration for her wry, often trenchant (“Isn’t hurt proportionate to the / distance one falls?”) lyric poems. Tinged with the dark spirit of Southern gothic, Driskell’s poems touch on Confederate cemeteries, cave art (“drawings of hands reaching / for something to grasp hold of”), social hierarchies (“My parents aspired to climb into the middle / class and cling tight”), and family health crises, reminding readers that we live in a “vast sore world” that resists our best intentions. Still, the poet’s painterly eye finds solace in nature: “A field of spiderwebs, outlined by globes / of tremulous dew, lit in the morning / sun.”