In "Light and Dark,"… William Bronk's first book of poems,… some anxious children in a car ask, "Where are we now?", to which the poem's narrator replies, "Pretty soon, pretty soon," suggesting that the answers we would like to hear are not always there. The narrator goes on, in this poem entitled "Some Musicians Play Chamber Music for Us," to instruct us that the worlds we seem to share are created worlds; like pieces of music, they are "composed, oh wholly and well composed." The tone is muted, the language spare, unable to alleviate either curiosity or uncertainty, yet the voice compels, even consoles; it is a strangely humane whistle in the dark.

Such an effect pervades the entire corpus of Bronk's poems and essays, for Bronk's is a poetry of the epistemological limit, a message formulated by a border guard on the outer reaches of our shared...