Loop, Anne Simpson’s second collection of poetry, strikes me as a deceptive book. The casual ease of its sonnets – a cycle of poems based on the aftermath of 9/11 and on seven paintings by Brueghel – and the spare loping of its couplets make it easy to overlook how carefully crafted these poems are. This is a real gift, I think. Not many contemporary poets can compose formal verse so naturally. Simpson’s terza rima about the Grand Canyon anachronistically revives a form more familiar in Shelley’s “Ode to a West Wind” yet one that is appropriate to a poem plunging back through geologic history to question what the canyon has seen.

Thematically, the book stays close to its central premise of repetition or return: every love arriving at its end, armies returning to their decimated cities, remembrances of childhood, the repeated steps of a dance, the cycle of activities among tenants of an asylum. In “A Moor, Rain,” Simpson writes about repeated domestic fights that finally stop. In “Mobius Strip,” she experiments with a new form, writing a bisected poem that endlessly returns on itself.

They’re lyrical poems, perhaps not stunning in the originality of their subjects, but satisfying, songlike and well made, with a store of images that ring true: “the heron lifting slowly – / with Churchillian effect – / into the air.” ( )