The Lumberjack's Dove

What to say about this book-length prose poem by Nethercott (A Ghost of Water; Modern Ballads)? A National Poetry Series selection, it brings you into a magpie's narrative of random glimpses, homilies, nonsense, lists, aphorisms, myths, clichés, snatches of history and science, and bits of nightly news. It's also a tightly constructed and vividly told tale that begins: "It's the same old story.// A lumberjack loses his hand to his own axe./ The hand becomes a dove. The hand tries/ to fly away but the lumberjack catches it/ beneath his shoe. You know this story. The/ lumberjack ties one end of a string to the/ hand & the other end to his belt. Then the/ lumberjack walks out of the forest, the/ airborne hand fluttering along behind." Is this poem a meaningful exploration of the art of storytelling as well as a meditation on what it means to be human, as promised on the back cover? Readers must draw their own conclusions.