Floyd Skloot's first substantial collection reads like an autobiography: section one concentrates on memories of a difficult childhood, in which both parents are sharply characterized; then follow poems about being a parent himself (including some feelings every father or mother will recognize in "Hazards"); thirdly, work dealing with the onset of his illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; and finally, poems that cling to the shores of experience-seascapes, glimpses of a beyond, and at least one death. This makes for a very satisfactory one-hundred-page book, yet there is no compromising of individual poems.

I very much enjoy Music Appreciation, its quietness, gentleness and-as one might hope from a collection with that title-genuine music. These are intelligent poems that wear their learning lightly and carry their emotional equipment unhistrionically. Skloot chooses plain subjects from the domestic scene so beloved of late twentieth-century poets (and so neglected in former centuries), but to this he brings an aloof lyricism, where the witty images, the taut playing of line against line, never divert the direct flight of his syntax. "Old Stories"-about the "second decade of marriage"-is typical. It ends with an image of a book, not a literary quotation:

Forty approaches.
       It is the time apart, not
the time together. It is loose
      skin, the six-mile run after work.
           No papers
and sweet rolls Sunday
    mornings. It is the tin
          anniversary,
new wrinkles in old
          stories, the text
hand-set and stitched, not perfect bound.