So many of the poems in Name & Earth, Kylan Rice’s new collection, have the intelligence of a villanelle. The very first, “Anniversary,” a diptych about lovers “lying in a new-turned field,” itself turns across two stanzas of equal length following the mention of a mirror:

This, Rice remarks not only of the mirror, a duplicative image throughout the book, is “a trick to make it look / as if the earth had zero depth, on either side of it / the sky.” “[E]ach darkening the other,” like in a series of infinite reflections—the Droste effect, named for a turn-of-the-century Dutch brand of cocoa—the lovers degrade simultaneously. (Meanwhile, staring at one’s own face “until it isn't me” would be Troxler fading.) Structure is thus its reproduction, a classic metaphor in the psychology of desire. You also have to admire letting “was was” be its own line, or at least you should.

Name & Earth impresses for its maturity and topical focus, cycling between the high and low of its title—clouds both actual and digital, what we call a body—with hydrologic inevitability. With “one to soothe the other,” the scenes Rice describes are as pastoral as Robert Frost, and potentially as dreamt up. (Given a farm in New Hampshire, Frost, a two-time Ivy dropout—Dartmouth, then Harvard—leased it as soon as he was legally able to. Dan Chiasson says it best, that “among writers, he seemed like a farmer, and among farmers he seemed like a writer.”) As in music, or Frost’s “The Most of It,” whose speaker wants “not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love, original response,” all talk, even with oneself, is dialectical. To articulate a thought is simultaneously to change your mind:

You simply can’t say for sure whether Rice’s interlocutor is living or an avatar for the natural world. Not that it matters.

Strained at the waist, the result of either scything wheat or an affliction of the more erotic sort (“Blood’s losing / struggle to be reticent”), Rice fixates on the purity of work: blood thuds like a lullaby and flax left for an animal tinkles in its metallic pail. Etymologically, the idea of husbandry, of cultivating land as well as one’s domestic commitments, fertilizes his verse as both religious and material obligations are yanked up and mulled over, though with almost no confessional specificity and without appearing tortured. Rice isn’t exactly spilling his guts, but hasn’t 75 years of American poets airing their dirty laundry has been more than enough? There’s something healthier in this, closer to aerating soil. Referential blips—school shootings, the pandemic—in the midst of poems whose themes are otherwise usually come off as perfunctory, tucked in (“My tongue keeps / slipping”), except Rice’s quietude means that he rarely shows his hand.

Name & Earth is meditational and floaty, like skipping rocks across a modest pond; neither cerebral nor affecting unsophistication, but contemplative of contemplation past and present. Thought thought, as it were. Besides their solemnity, Rice’s lines frequently manage a bit of ekphrasis: “The clods of earth. [. . .] The bowing of the back, until it looks like prayer,” to take just one example, which necessarily recalls Jean-François Millet. Elsewhere, the subject might be paleolithic art or stained glass. Name & Earth is striated, full of faint remembrances from Genesis (“if this can't be light, then let it be / indelible”) to Emily Dickinson, as when:

Rice thrives on a kind of analogical play wherein objects are likened to unlike counterparts, with another’s palm a wrinkled calculator and “late-spring coolness [the author’s] forehead / resting on the mortar-work.” Compound names are concocted for the scale on an imaginary flute.

If, at every plunge, the worlds are the same one of rural Utah, killing time in a cemetery or studying the “dry geometry” of a hive abandoned by its bees (an “aftermath”), that narrowness—local, and dialed-in to Rice’s anxieties—feels strategic, “pattern[ing . . .] the sleeping mind” with “summaries of principles / and theorems”: snippets of lost experience, with comments on the promises we make to ourselves and fail to keep, on a newfound want of spontaneity. In other words, the opposite of “self-control, which I forget // I had decided in advance to lose.” Name & Earth has the ambition of a far less pocketable book, including a sequence titled after coordinates of latitude and longitude, a double sonnet crown (“the optic nerve is predisposed to pleiades, / to wormholes, coronas”) that's also annotated, and a one-sentence tour through France hundreds of lines in length. Touchingly, and in spite of such Herculean feats, Rice begins and ends with those lovers’ anniversary, an anniversary of course being that which comes around again.

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