"where the branches of its language break": another review of Scape

In the new issue of Harp & Altar, Patrick Morrissey reads Scape (and Rob Schlegel's The Lesser Fields, a book I've been meaning to get) not as examples of ecopoetics but as "postmodern pastorals," "a kind of self-aware 'nature poetry': personal lyrics that present the charged relationship between the poetic speaker and the natural world as alive with the possibility for both renewal and negation":

In Scape, Harmon’s linguistic maps take a variety of forms: from the deftly handled short line and double-jointed syntax of “Whither” to the longer line and more stable syntax of this first section of “Landscape”; from the delicate projective spread of the twenty-third section of “Landscape” to the prose blocks that appear at intervals throughout the book. In all of these poems, Harmon sustains a characteristic diction and tone (a disarming blend of naturalist description, intellectual code, and slangy directness), and at its strongest (as in the passage from “Whither” quoted above or lines from “Landscape” like “slushy gray, tire-tracked: / bring back / this busted even- / ing, the hilly town / ditched,” the coincidence of the scoured, tightly coiled language with careful attention to physical detail indeed recalls Zukofsky or, at times, Basil Bunting.