Gary Geddes's poetry focuses on marginal figures in society, especially those who are caught in an ethical bind. Geddes is interested in people who are pulled between an instinctive sense of what is eternally, morally right and a desire, which has not quite surfaced, to say to hell with it all and to ignore any responsibility for human beings who have ignored their responsibilities to them. This is the concern which defines Geddes as a political poet. He is political not so much because he addresses issues of current public-policy debate or because he adopts modish causes, but because his characters are involved, or are implicated almost in spite of themselves, in considering their responsibility to their community of fellow humans and in discovering the lines of power and obligation in communities as large as a nation or as small as a classroom. As this description implies, Geddes's...