This book contains a recurring joyfulness that invites us into those brightest of spaces: memory and meditation. The poet's feelings are sometimes sharp with deliberate and thoughtful sarcasm; they can also soar with lyrical sweetness. John Minczeski has a penchant for winged things -- not only planes but mayflies, bats, as well as the engagements of the human heart. Even the simple iris that "starts life / as boxing gloves" and "ends with the smell / of bridesmaids" becomes, in his attentive poem, an object of weightlessness and wonder. Minczeski takes on many concerns: the personal past, history and its unsettlements, natural history, some poets that read like travel pieces though certainly they are about inner space as much as outer space. This is a fine, sweet-spirited, ambitious, beautifully accomplished book.