Bone Flute and Other Poems.  R. Virgil Ellis.  A Parallel Press Chapbook (http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu);  41 pages; ISBN 1-893311-88-0; 2007.  $10.00

             Most of the poems in this chapbook have been previously published in small press magazines such as Cream City Review, The Blue Train, The Lucid Stone, Black Buzzard Review, and several anthologies of Wisconsin poets.   This chapbook makes Ellis’ work available to a wider audience.

 His subject matter includes family life, love, raising children, what to tell them about the world out there.  Nature is usually present as a backdrop to these poems, and in others is the whole poem.  Sometimes nature and work are juxtaposed in an ironic way. Some moments are as small as taking a swim, and coming back “to the glory of ordinary air.”  (Great sounds in that line too).  In others like “Chain Sawing” (a perfect haiku) the rhythm of work and the  larger natural rhythm we tend to ignore are pasted against each other:  deep in the last cut,/when I happened to look up, /the barred owl took off. And this contrast comes up again and again in the poems. 

            In  “Firefly Time,”  which begins “deep in a June night/the yard becomes a kind of sky,” he makes a perfect image which reverses perceptions.

When you read these poems of Ellis’, be alert  for outrageous punning:  “Alas, Poor Buick” starts, “you were no mere slip of a grille . . . .”  No room to quote the entire poem, but it is the pathetic fallacy wonderfully tricked out,  ending “junkmen finger your secret parts. “

            Ellis is a great punster, a turner of words and phrases, a craftsman, a carpenter, shaping shaping, shaping.  A good read.  Buy it, you’ll enjoy.