Flute Music in the Cello's Belly

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Doctors have a rule against operating on family members. The reasoning
is that a physician who is too emotionally involved with a patient might
find his or her judgment clouded by feelings. There should be a similar
rule for poets when it comes to writing about grandchildren and other
close family members. If this book is any indication, writers who are
carried away by familial love and pride can make errors in aesthetic
judgment: “Winsome is the grace you / lend our skeptic table / with
your wrinkling chin-wag / smile is all jiggle / and jollity”
(“Jollity”).

Poems of love and courtship have an edge, usually because there’s
some anxiety about losing the loved one. Happy poems about established
families don’t have that edge. Such families lack the interest of
conflict; as Tolstoy observed, their stories are all the same. Flute
Music in the Cello’s Belly is truly a book for family members and
close friends; for the rest of us, it is a gallery of strangers enjoying
special moments.