Gary Geddes's collection of new lyrics and poem-sequences, The Oysters I Bring to Banquets, ranges from whimsical poems about the building of a greenhouse to Achilles' struggles coping with interfering relatives and his extended family, the gods; from poems about Yukon adventures to the plight and wonder of monarch butterflies in the Mexican highlands. It's not only a diverse gathering of elegies for friends, literary luminaries and creatures and natural habitats in a world under siege, but also a series of hymns to art, beauty, human dignity and endurance. His keen eye for political disasters and inequities, more muted here than in his previous work, still reaches down into the "rag-and-bone shop," to human rights abuses in Africa, the refugee crisis, challenges facing women writers in a patriarchal society, and the climate crisis. But Geddes is attentive as always to the fusion of content and form. If you feel termites gnawing at your timbers, take time to read the witty and hilarious sequence "The Greenhouse Effect," the moving "Elegy" (for the late John Asfour), the poignant "J-35" for the vanishing orcas, and "By No Means Gone" for the late Eavan Boland. They will make you glad to be alive and to know that the language and someone out there truly care. Book jacket.