In This Maybe Best of All Possible Worlds by William Page FutureCycle Press, 2016 The winner of the FutureCycle Press's Poetry Prize for 2016, In This Maybe Best of All Possible Worlds is William Page's fifth collection. It moves with wisdom and grace through three sections that explore the insistent truth that joy and grief, the embrace of life and its inevitable loss are the opposing gravities we live with. To give voice and shape to the experiences of this very "maybe" world of ours, we need poetry. We need William Page. In the book's first section, the poet offers us "The Heathen," a young boy in Catholic school. On his side of the classroom window are naptime and Sister Mary Catherine. Beckoning on the other is an exuberantly free world: "I lusted to arise, and flee out to the sunny lawn/ where the sugar maple's golden leaves were falling." In his imagination, a collie calls him "into the joy of its barking." There is a life waiting for him outside his school's rigid structures, and he can't wait to rush into it. In "Flight of the Dead," the boy, almost dozing, again looks out a window. He is in an airplane on a brilliant morning, but outside and beneath him is a place of loss and fear: I cannot disturb the dead whose love has gone to ground. From this strange height I cannot wake the terrified fox from its dream — He asks himself the question demanded by these clashing perspectives: "Except for my waking to life, what can I / offer this radiance of morning?" Within the question lies his answer: rather than choose despair, he will mirror the morning. He will not doze away the pain; he will awaken to life. The poet recognizes others who have asked this question and answered it in different ways — James Dickey, J. D. Salinger, Charles Trenet, the French singer-songwriter who probably performed before Hitler — and Page pays them homage in his poems. Buddha, too, appears as guide and mediator. "He did not ride/ into Nirvana on a skateboard," Page tells us, yet We must all be little Buddhas, saffron robes trailing behind our skateboards like serpents of smoke from cigarettes, as we scoot our way to oblivion. It's a startling image, inventive and comical, yet the destination is still and always the same: we skateboard to oblivion. Or we ride motorcycles. "Myron Gatz," drill sergeant and motorcycle instructor, is the on the poet's "fading list of my heroes." In life, he screamed commands "to the wind" as his soldiers sweated and his motor throbbed: obey orders, never offend honor, defend our country "like a god riding a lion." "But where is this going?" our questioning poet asks. "Myron was mortal / cursing us into courage with a Texas twang." Yet "holding the handlebars of his fate, / [this hero] had put on his last day like a gas mask and gone." The touching, often slapstick way we all have of facing the inevitable yet remaining wide awake to life is expressed in the volume's title poem. A young man, Nathan, is dead in a car accident. Returning to the affirmation he achieves as a boy looking out the window of an airplane, the poet faces the brute fact of Nathan's sudden, early death. The poet cannot "blow the dust from the mouths of the dead," but in this maybe best of all possible worlds I can hear stones singing to the wind. I can restore Nathan’s breathing, let him ride again, keep him sixteen and singing. It's what we ask of poetry: to mediate between life and death, even rewrite the casual obliteration of a young man's song. Our clear-eyed, open-hearted poet never stops championing the stubborn, heroic human will to persist in loving life, embracing it, giving it meaning: Once you get used to the idea the world is a terrible place, it's not so bad … Every day is as precarious as these pieces of change I've stood on edge. And we've no more knowledge of the future than falling coins' prescience of heads or tails. But dime dumb or penny silly, I count my life a fortune. This is a book to savor. Reading it, we enjoy the company of a poet. Raconteur and friend, guide and mentor, lover and interrogator of life, William Page speaks to us all. Visit FutureCycle Press' Website

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.