PositivePlough... a collection that both marvels at and rails against human frailty, against the backdrop of a fallen universe. The book’s seriousness lies in its sustained resistance to the easy way out: either to reject or embrace, without caveat, a cosmos that consists, in equal measures, of miracle and outrage ... tensions resonate at the level of poetic form, an inextricable element in the thought processes of Juster’s work. His mastery of traditional forms showcases itself in Wonder and Wrath, with a range that includes the sonnet, the pantoum, the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tetrameter line, and a blank verse so tightly modulated that any metrical shift or substitution calls attention to itself like a detour sign ... As the culminating poems in a work of \'serious\' poetry...parodies hold together in themselves the book’s concerns: the uncertainty of the material world, the simultaneous failures and potentialities of language to mediate and order that world, and the strange, divided, sometimes hostile country that is the self. If the mind behind Wonder and Wrath is laughing, often enough it laughs to keep from breaking something.
