Bagg's poems, early and late, favor the genres, melodies, rhymes, and strong rhythms of traditional verse. But Bagg also often takes advantage of the freer practice of the twentieth-century, since the "freedom" it encourages allows for plunging ahead when necessary with little heed for decorum. Realizing that he often includes unusual words or odd bits of lore (classical, arcane, personal) in these poems, he has annotated the most obscure references, and occasionally the circumstances that provoked a particular poem, in the appended “Notes.” But readers will not need to puzzle over the main thrust of these poems, which Bagg hopes will be, even the darker ones, both understandable and enjoyable.
“Many of these poems are as powerful, shocking even, as any being written. Also quieter. They sink in and stay in. “Ostrakoi,” “The Closest Thing,” “Body Blows,” “Be Good,” “Horsegod,” “Take Care,” to name a few, are events in themselves. Like the city of Rome––which crops up not as a trope, but as lived experience––they compact their weathering layers of moral, political, sexual, and intellectual history (Bagg’s own) into an intensely immediate consciousness. His benchmarks are classical and Greek, an occasion he can and does rise to. At such moments the poems are realizations of something truly extraordinary: ecstatic experience, and the sense of awe.”
James Scully
"A gorgeous collection that tells the author’s life story in exquisite verse. Bagg writes that he follows Ezra Pound’s dictum, that “poetry should be as well written as prose.” This is curious advice from the Modernist master, since many believe poetry to be the more scrupulous mode—or at least one that requires more careful attention to writing. But after reading a few of Bagg’s poems, readers begin to understand how well written he expects prose to be—and how deeply that expectation has infused his work. In all his verse, the author brings the comprehensibility of prose together with the accuracy of poetry, and accomplishes a near-miracle. Many of his works recall the easy expertise of John Ashbery, another experimenter with prose poems. Listen to the unadorned, unpretentious force with which he announces his mother’s death in the collection’s opening, and perhaps strongest piece, “Ostrakoi”: “The morning Mother died, Dad walked me / through her roses: ‘It’s so unfair … Mom dying / at sixty-two.’” Such economy of language allows for the communication of complex emotion without the embarrassment of showy melodrama. (Another highlight is “The Closest Thing,” the author’s account of his brief brushes with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, a delicious treat for lovers of 20th-century literature.) Like a well-made shoe, Bagg’s writing is comfortable, durable and put together with meticulous care. But the author is a bit of a cobbler himself, filling his works with myriad allusions to topics from Greek myth to Roman architecture to Dantean tragedy. ... Superb poetry from an established talent.
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