Let us begin with the delicate, laddered web of the title: Advance the Engine Summer. Is it a dyslexic plea? An imperative? An observation on the relentless progression of beauty and decay? The title poem captures a kind of almost irrational optimism that against cold odds, summer will follow winter—with April proofing the galleys:

Advance the engine summer. Dress cold window boxes in green Leaves to fill the rifts in The unfolding of noon….

Michael Leggs’ poetry, always written in complete lyrical sentences, resonates in a painful yet beautiful world in which his verse seeks traction. And unlike the impenetrable mysteries of so many modern collections, the reader of Advance The Engine Summer can enter these poems seriously with the confidence that time spent will not be wasted—with the knowledge that there is more in these than we might have hoped for. Leggs builds something here that is rare in modern poetic diction: delicate bridges from which we can view fantastic falls.

For many readers, modern poetry offers barriers not because the expression is not literal or direct, but because with reduced translucency comes the suspicion that we are being had—that the deeper meaning is not there, or that it only exists in the mind of the poet. While Legg’s poems are far from simple, it is not that hard to gather inklings of the territory into which he is moving, and the nature of his trajectory. All trails are subtly blazed. Even the more obscure poems here offer (handholds? mindgrips?) which can be profitably accessed by a bit of foreknowledge or research. “Station to Station in Madrid” for example, works wonderfully if you know Salvador Dali’s "Burning Giraffes and Telephones", if you have read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and enjoyed the view through Emerson's “transparent eyeball,” and if you realize, after thinking about all the directions the poem takes, that sticking one’s neck out carries incendiary risks….