Welcoming Disaster collects roughly a decade of Jay Macpherson's light verse and mad jottings and brilliant myth-making poems. The volume … is full of bright designs and dark conceits, amphisbaenic or yin-and-yang emblems; invocation, asides, and acknowledgments have all been severely dealt with…. [There] is really no describing a production like this—no substitute for having it. The book has a plot of sorts: at the end of a special and intimate friendship, presumably a love affair, the poet tries to get her capsized vessel afloat through a return to the terrors of childhood and the necessary unmourned losses of adult life. Her injunctions of self-command are directed to, or rather deflected off, a splendid toy bear called Tadwit or Ted, as the sequence moves from consolation to guilt to terror and finally to a deepened consolation. Miss Macpherson looks at her own life as well as Ted when...