It matters little where you open this book: the sentences you’ll see, the periods you’ll hear will surprise you by their unostentatious elegance, their clarity, the internal echoes everywhere, the modulation of the rhythms.

Almost forty years have passed since the heyday of the New Narrative, which centered on McDowell, Mark Jarman, and their journal The Reaper. What happened to this movement was predictable. Critics ignored or dismissed it, the Language school claimed to have transcended it, mainstream poets superficially appropriated some aspects, and the battle the Reaper sought was never joined. The insights of the New Narrative remain, however; they inform the work of certain poets (including this reviewer), and are validated by Sweet Wolf, McDowell’s superb new Selected Poems.