The Boy in the Well is Daniel Mark Epstein’s sixth book of poems. The plain-spoken, almost prosaic language of these poems is very different from the lyrical, sumptuous writing of Spirits (1987), his last collection. Very different, too, are the subjects that Epstein trains his eye on in this volume. The love poems of Spirits have given way mainly to narratives on historical subjects and poems dealing with myth and legend: for example, “Phidias in Exile,” “The Venus of Urbino,” “The Ferryman” (this last is about Charon, the ferryman who escorts the dead over the river Styx to Hades). Not that an interest in history is new for Epstein. No Vacancies in Hell (1973), his first book, featured poems about nineteenth-century Baltimore (the poet hails from that city and now resides there), while The Book of Fortune (1982) contained poems about Thomas Edison and the Civil War. The Boy in the Well recalls these two earlier volumes in the same way that Spirits recalls Young Men’s Gold (1978), love poems written in a lavish, at times wonderfully ornate language.

Although Epstein often delves deep into the past in The Boy in the Well, the book begins with poems that take place in the present and speak admiringly of those who can live in it unburdened by an acute sense of history. In “Lost Owl,” the owl “singing from the oak tree in our yard” charms the poet’s son but disturbs the poet because he is aware that