Fiercely elegiac, the title poem of Paul Hoover's desolation : souvenir began as a ?filling in? of the blank spaces in A Tomb for Anatole, Paul Auster's translation of Mallarm??'s grief-stricken notes for a poem that he never completed on the death of his ten-year-old son. However, Hoover's writing soon turned to his own consideration of life, death, the breaking of family relations, and loss of love as experienced by all of us: ?when death plays / with a child / it goes out nimble / comes back cold / life that traitor / aboard a razor boat.? Written in three terse stanzas, each of the poem's 50 pages offers a phrase that becomes the title of its opposite number at the other end of the manuscript. The result is a haunting echoic effect that becomes especially rich as the phrases ?cross? at the middle of the sequence. At times, the poem mourns the loss of the earth itself: ?what will be enough / when the earth / contains no one / will the harvest still be full? and ?no bees in the hive, no hive / sound returns to its bell.? Inspired by his reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the companion poem, ?The Windows (The Actual Acts),? consists of a series of philosophical propositions in everyday language: ?An object is the actual awaiting further action. / It can wait a long time. / Time is fresh in objects even when they decay. / You can't give one example of time getting old.? Another series of thoughts begins: ?Have you every gazed from a window to see if everything's still there? / And see your own face in the glass, superimposed on the view? / Consciousness rests among its objects. / Which makes the objects restless.? Long established as a poet of wit and intelligence, Paul Hoover now establishes himself as an important voice of deep emotional resonance and far ranging vision.