Lucid enigmas, enexpected moments of insight whose insight escapes even as it startles, dreams that are nor the author's but seem instead to dream him. The serial poems in Distant Noise present spare scenes shot through with surprise and the kind of truth found only in disorientation. Emperors and students gaze across landscapes of uncertainty, and ordinary human interaction has become a game of stilted gestures and official regulations. The "sacred law" explored here creates its spiritual reverence by tearing reverence apart; the sensual, quiet lyrics seem restrained by an often unspeakable violence. These poems are both lovely and disturbing, their precise details emptied of all but a central problem--the nature of language and what it has done to us. The goal is not to tell us what we didn't know we knew; instead, the poems here stand as reminders of all the things we have never even realized that we didn't understand.