As in Dante's Commedia, many different types of language - the political, the spiritual, the scientific, the commercial, the playful, the poetic - jostle up against each other in the way that language so often does in life. Like Dante, Baker refuses to isolate the poetic from the living. Yet, however fragmented, the poems work together as a compelling whole, thanks to Baker's measured and masterful use of the prose poem. The letters from the underworld represent the neo-modernist lyric at its best.Ian Seed