Joe Rosenblatt's Winter of the Luna Moth, is [an] … interesting if somewhat flawed, book. Rosenblatt has a weird sense of humour and a strange ear for puns. His poems run the gamut of language, from the gutter to a medieval hymnary, while he acts as a word-alchemist, changing nouns to verbs, adjectives to nouns, and so on. But far too often they fail to reach a destination, leaving one with some brilliant lines, and occasional lovely verses, but seldom a complete poem. The ideas and images are often exciting, but they stand apart from the poems in which they appear. When he does get everything working together, however, the results are unique:

        Fernanda, you teach my touch new breath—
        opossum micing my senses in music opuses;
        O, I grew a love root opposite—
        glands gleed locust of mole cricketing;
        is multinudes of moth in milch flood.
                                       "Mothlady."

The...