The fourth volume of poems by this Harvard professor and leading poetry critic. Belmont is both his home and a reference in the Merchant of Venice, reflecting Burt’s tendency to move from the quotidian and mundane (Storrow Drive, Ocean Lots, access road to Dulles, Swingline stapler) to deep feelings and observations about the lot of human kind.  Lebanon, NH and Kendall Square make appearances.  Focused largely on his young children and the innocence that children bring to the world, his poetry inevitably drifts to aging, death, finitude and climate change.  Lots of new words to look up.  Best line is in a poem entitled, Text Messages:

       Introns:  Behold the humanities library’s long shelves,

                       each hardback tagged like bands on DNA—–

some of the code thus labeled spells out all life;

most of the rest of it never gets read at all.