All This Could Be Yours

Like the promise of its title, All This Could Be Yours is full of elusive gifts. Joshua Trotter's debut collection is a metaphysical hall of windows that seem to be mirrors and mirrors presenting themselves as windows. Trotter's poems—which could be the bastard love-children of Stevens and Frost—refract, reflect and deflect with canny puns and rhymes, the rigour of their forms belying the rogue trickster twists of cockeyed logic they take and the po-faced near-sense in which they speak. Don't be fooled into thinking these poems glib: Trotter is often most serious precisely at his most blithe; his poems are always thought-full. Full of “intemperate winds / blown thinking from the ledge, through the gap // between the frame and what it haunts for us,” they resist the intelligence, almost successfully, as Stevens said a poem should.