For the most part, these are not poems that grip the reader violently by the throat or heart. Tranquilla’s gift is subtler. He builds an invisible web around the reader, who is surprised each time a small thing is caught “shimmering like a mayfly on the summer breeze” (“Turning”). He accomplishes this effect with casual language, controlled phrasing and well-placed line breaks. In the stunning “Those Who Trespass,” which reveals the human impulse to both create and subvert order, this craftsmanship is on display:

 

Little sins satisfy her the most: tomatoes, ripe

as fire, pilfered from a neighbor’s yard…

 

*

 

…She drinks them in

 

as a palm frond gathers each precious drop

of water for its roots.

 

The unified vocabulary of images and even tone helps create cohesion in the collection. Southern California imagery spins out from almost every poem, especially “Floribunda,” where “Palm trees/rise as black silhouettes against an ocean blue sky.” Flora and fauna are ever-present, as in “Crossing the Lethe,” where the “sidewalk blossoms with silver trails,/raccoons plucking fleshy snails from fragile shells” and “Green Christmas,” where “dew weeps on the iris/and the rosemary, not enough to save/the birds of paradise.” Images of home, “A day/quiet as an empty house” (“The first thought to my mind”); and domestic life, “a woman with a sugar bowl/always open on her table” (“Turning”), also figure throughout, creating a tapestry of suburban bliss frayed at the edges.

 

In What Remains, Tranquilla seems to acknowledge this dream of domestic bliss is as close as we’ll ever get to Eden; yet, even in the realm of climbing ivy and manicured lawns, there is the lie that longs to be told, the restlessness and the disruptions—both intentional and accidental—that reveal our “tenuous grip” (“What Remains”) on the idyll.