Three of my four poems in this issue of Notre Dame Review are part of a series about the fall of the Roman Empire. The poems in the series are inspired by stories related by Tacitus, St. Augustine, Seutonius, and Livy. Still, I couldn't help updating, generalizing, adding anachronistic details, and playing-so the poems also include images of airplanes, hot-air balloons, diners, hymns, and telephones. I'm most interested in writing about grand, sweeping histories-perhaps as a kind of reaction against the temptation of the easy, confessional lyric.

The Roman series is the conclusion of a larger manuscript called The Finger Bone. All the poems in that manuscript are about disasters of one kind or another. The book begins with poems on failed romances then escalates to pieces on science experiments gone wrong, auto wrecks, and helicopter crashes. Just before the Roman sequence is a series called "For the Dead," much of which will appear in a coming issue of NDR.

New poems from The Finger Bone can be found in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Meridian.