Using a variety of formal strategies, the poems in this collection trace connections between art and life; between the exaltation of lyrical flight and the mundane experience of ordinary days; between (you might say) grand opera and reality. The styles employed range from the formality of sonnets, ballads, a rondeau, a pantoum, quatrains, couplets, and some other nonce forms, through various unrhymed or unmetrical hybrid forms, to the more muted lyricism of free verse and even prose poems. Along with traditional forms, narrative is used to help build suspense and sustain dramatic interest, to generate levels of irony, and to create more satisfying patterns. Again and again, these poems struggle to forge the loose details of domestic life, remembered experience, and close observation of the natural world into something like the crystallized music of an aria, where at least for a moment the world remains vivid, harmonious, and sensuously beautiful.