African-American and a native of the South, poet Carl Martin's literal and figurative "Brit vernacular" asks of its reader nothing less than a total ignorance of expectation. These poems, coming after a long silence--Martin's first book, the acclaimed "Go Your Stations, Girl," appeared in 1991, and his second, "Genii Over Salzburg," in 1998--engage Romantic tropes such as Vision, Beauty, and the Self cheek-by-jowl with a Pop madness and a Modern despair, all in a high cadence that is winkingly isolate, stunningly productive. Martin's allusions and affinities are to and with Olympians of aesthetic conduct: Tolstoy, Maxfield Parrish, Jean Genet, Maeterlinck, Kate Moss, Peter Pan, the Green Man. "That's a sprinkle of rice in the air, a small fountain/ ingrained in the brain. Some glee in a philosophy/ of interference between world and self. Objects/ Flee, bolting and coursing in the wide green field." These lines are marbled through with the Real, and buffed by an apprehension so alert to Unreality as to be downright illuminating.