The Dissolving Island Author:David Rigsbee A forceful achievement using elegies and love poems, narrative, nature lyrics, and the dramatic monologue to take up themes of art, nature, and death, not in grandiose proportions, but in the small details of a man's life. There is the resounding slap of a newspaper on a porch, a dying possum that refuses to play dead, and the spread of canc... more »er "like rain on a carpet." Throughout, there is an inevitable "melting of the beaches" as in the title poem, which finds its center in the sucking sound of a man's carefully constructed island "slid(ing) back into the sea." Poet and former Southern Review editor Dave Smith calls The Dissolving Island "the work of a raconteur of the spirit."« less