Poetry. With CATAFALQUES, Eric Basso plunges deeper, and more dangerously, into the interior distance he began to explore in his previous book, THE SMOKING MIRROR. Haunted by a sense of loss and foreboding, this fourth collection is rich in poems that raise the quiet mutiny against a withering cosmos. A dark magic works here, sustained by poetry that is often complex, ironic, disquieting, impassioned, and sometimes even wildly comic. The poet's resonant voice convokes a cycle of spellbinding images, both concrete and elusive, that are indeed flares burning in the counterfeit night.