Selected Poems June 1988 opens an angle of vision just wide enough to prevent "words from betraying fact." The book is allusive, yet its allusiveness squares with its persistent hermetic quality, reinforcing it, keeping the angle open: "let's write upside down / nothing left unsaid for" Ritual and figure ally these poems to dance, constellate their silences as situations in space: "suppose I said / I wasn't there?" Their intimate, mindful details turn sites in physical space into intricate code, into a sequence without head or tail: "tempted to take it all off and see what's / underneath / fawn / cat / rest a blank / filled in at leisure / eye / an inch off earth"

This "libretto for animals, people and machines," strings together elegant verbal structures mirroring chorale and canon. In The Toy Palace cats and humans suffer under u.s. ideology. A children's solo puts a slip-knot in the snare of all edifying discourse: "I'm to blame / I'm fire and name and / doggone / wonderful / yours / I'm mine / not yours or theirs / cereal surreal sir real for reel / dirt and dust and pain and birth and ash / I'm blamed" A permutation poem simulates led messages, a pervasive feature of any city--any toy palace. Charles Doria responds to urban architecture, suspending its patterns in language, "in a separate space entirely." He never loses sight of the chaos against which the patterns are conceived: "In space the imagination / where every toy lives / five little fingers / and their familiars play."