[Josephine Miles] is focused on American promises, but hers is the carved ivory rather than the bow-wow strain. In "Ride," for example, she describes her relation to the land realized from the dreams of Adams and Jefferson:

     It's not my world, I grant, but I made it.
     It's not my ranch, lean oak, buzzard crow,
     Not my fryers, mixmaster, well-garden.
     And now it's down the road and I made it.
 
      It's not your rackety car but you drive it.
     It's not your four-door, top-speed, white-wall tires,
     Not our state, not even, I guess, our nation,
     But now it's down the road, and we're in it.

As Randall Jarrell acutely remarked thirty years ago, Miles is a specialist in the sly, dry, minimal observation [see CLC, Vol. 1]. Yet sometimes, especially in the "Poems New" which open To All Appearances, the observations make an impact which is not minimal. In...