Set Pieces of the Feminine

James C. McCullagh has studied Jungian psychology in New York and Philadelphia and the archetypal elements in Set Pieces of the Feminine float just below the surface. This book is also informed by dreams or a somewhat wacky dreamscape. But the treatment is neither predictable nor linear. McCullagh seems comfortable populating the neighborhoods between the real and surreal with his gang of players, many of them men, who as the protagonist in "Love as Calligraphy" moves "roughly to her sex" but is "slowed by a voice/cautioning him that the sweet/path is through the pictographs/climbing from her low hem/to her girdled neck." Poetry is the language of slowing down, moving inside and staying with the image. This book does just that.