In a country where much of the prominent poetry seeks to affirm the fleeting present and its changing values, John Peckโs poetry comes as an important, if unlikely, gift. Peckโs verse deals the cards of the fragmentary, ideogramic, juxtapositional, and elliptical through the deck of normally discursive syntax. Echoing late high Modernism, Peckโs work, in the words of novelist Joseph McElroy, is โa way of seeing things,โ confident โin the packed vividness of the referential.โ Avoiding the narrow identity- or group-specific viewpoint of some of his contemporaries, Peck invites us to enter the larger humanscape and unearth with him unnoticed connections to our shared past and to one another. In Contradance, his ninth collection, Peckโs passion for inquiry and historical reflection has never been stronger or more beautifully embodied.