Over the course of Ed Barrett's career he has manifested the prose poem as a vehicle to discover unselfconscious patterns of language and thought that arise in recurring patterns as fluid and pliant as stalks of kelp beneath where the Atlantic meets the shores of Ireland to patterns as sustaining as rebar in the structures of Boston's Big Dig.

In many ways, Barrett's work builds on itself -- an archipelago of poems stretching out into the ocean, ordered outside time, place (or places-- inner as well as outer). He creates a foundational geology of thought and feeling that ultimately falls to what he can share a d what he sees.

The prose poems cover the extent of Barrett's oeuvre and end with two new sequences -- "Blow-in Addresses" and "Viking Renga." These pieces culminate in portraying a collaboration with one another, a kind of interrogation of the universe and a marveling at this tenuous, brief life we all occupy at this moment.

This selected reflects the "gathering in" of a Brooklyn-bred, Boston-fired poet fully grounded in his Irish roots.