In the final stanza of the poem, “My Generation,” the speaker assumes first-person plural to express simultaneous conviction and confusion: “I know we must take a stand. / Yet toward what goal will we fight ‘til the end?” (53) Earlier reference to “New Babel’s towers falling down” (52) underscores the speaker’s religious conviction in dramatic circumstance, while three separate supplications—for someone to “lend me two eyes” (53), to “lend me sight” (53), and to “show me just one way” (53)—indicate an earnest attempt to understand and remedy subjective blind spots. This ambitious embrace of not only generational stakes but also personal doubt underlies the thematic exploration in Ethan McGuire’s debut full-length poetry collection, Apocalypse Dance (Resource Publications: 2025). The poet’s finely-tuned ear is the dominant ordering principle throughout this grouping of formal and free verse, which features rhyme, meter, syllabic experimentation, and translations from classical Chinese. McGuire uses his command of musicality in language to articulate the beginnings of an uncertain synthetic mysticism, grounded in but not limited to Christianity, while bearing witness to 21st-century disasters.
Despite a tendency toward the eternal present of lyric, there are just enough specific details for readers to locate McGuire’s apocalyptic visions in a contemporary context. In “The Earth Lives On,” a series of unrhymed quatrains structured with a refrain, the speaker details a place where “Viruses put fires to countries” (71), where “Men steer machines to kill others” (70), and where “corruption’s rot ever creeps” among “authoritarians” and “populists” (70) who rise to power. A poem of blank verse in tercets, “Red Christmas Kettles” uses iconic realist imagery to present the “averting eyes” (64) of an atomized speaker: “I turn my troubled thoughts against my town, / Until Salvation Army Santas stand / To ring their bells and shiver through their smiles” (64). In the Whitmanesque long stanzas of “Hurricane Sally Aftermath,” the speaker catalogues “The mast of a sailboat impaling an office— / Black petrol water washed through a bank’s lobby—” (49) and other details from the “mournful wreckage” (49) of the 2020 storm. By using supporting poems like these to establish a setting with clear links to the world of the reader, McGuire allows his lyric and narrative excursions into imagined terrain—where the poet’s inspired voice shines—to accrue the heightened stakes of implicit context.
The collection often returns to a syllabic approach to the stanza and the line. Some traditional syllabic forms are present, such as “Absence of Desire,” a sequence of haiku, and “Autumn Wind/Winter Rush,” a sequence of cinquains. The cinquain’s compact five-line, 2/4/6/8/2-syllable stanza is in conversation with the experimental “Generational Malaise,” a collection of syllabics that grow according to the Fibonacci sequence, which McGuire has capped at a similarly compact six-line, 1/1/2/3/5/8-syllable stanza:
Must
. . . We
Choose Christ
Or Buddha?
Choose Friedman or Marx?
Yet we are independent, God.
Life
Pays
Back dues.
Our parents’
Rebellion became
Unearned wealth. Now life has arrived. (38-39)
He then chooses to conclude the sequence with a principled departure from the form, in three seven-syllable lines: “We are not lost in your Hell. / We simply wander in search, / Some kind of Heaven to find” (39). The poet’s engagements with the compression and forced economy of syllabics often produce an intimate first-person speaker, which—in contrast to the translations, persona poems, moral narratives, and abstract lyrics—manifests many of the collection’s most directly personal moments.
Meanwhile, some of the book’s most perceptive encounters arrive in the lyric mode, using sparse, symbolic language that is ordered primarily according to its sound. There are traditional forms, such as sonnets—in iambic trimeter (“The Way,” a depiction of ethics) or iambic pentameter (“Nostalgia by Night,” a depiction of sin)—or such as the villanelle, “A Sinner’s Prayer: A Portrait,” elegantly constructed around dissonance between the repeating lines: “God, I do not believe in who you are,” and, “Come heal me, give me grace. I’m not that far” (16). McGuire also uses the tools of lyric to fashion his own structures, such as the powerful “Refugee Song,” a series of five rhymed quatrains with a refrain. The first four stanzas detail various disasters (including “wildfires,” “tornadoes,” and a “mother[’s] search for food” 43), all of which the speaker neither experiences directly, nor cares to remember—until the wholly-indented fifth stanza:
I see my home before it fell to flame.
I see my people whisper our cursed name.
I see community I can’t reclaim.
We wander; I remember all. (43)
Rather than a distant witness, the speaker is now a direct victim; rather than being able to deflect and minimize, the speaker is now unable to forget. Although social and mass media are never mentioned in the poem, the anaphoric “I see” that announces each successive image implicates our digitally connected world of constant witnessing.
Against the collection’s vividly illustrated backdrop of sin, judgment, urgency, and doubt, several of McGuire’s most impactful poems begin the work of articulating an affirmative vision of spiritual disposition. Perhaps the most directly philosophical, “Fever of the Tao,” which features an epigram from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (“The rebellion of ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of branches against the tree” 50), puts forward a mystical understanding of personal experience. “The universe stretches past knowledge” (50), asserts the speaker, who claims to be “Pursuing my truth, pursuing truths” (51), and who describes
Yearning to find my world’s, nature’s, order,
Longing for paths, ways, roads, for doctrines:
The reality of life before description.
Never will I need another, never. (51)
The speaker’s emphasis on direct experience (“past knowledge” and “before description,” 50-51) and love for the divine are classic tenets of mystical tradition. Astute readers may notice that this aligns not only with the thematic content of several other poems in the book, but also with the sonic basis of McGuire’s poetics. It is no accident that many mystical traditions emphasize sonic experience as a pathway to divine encounter, including the guidance of tools such as prayer, meditation, song, and silence. By preferring the tools of sound to bring euphonic order to language—rather than ordering the text by strict semantic or imagistic coherence—McGuire’s musical speakers are not unlike little mystics, using their sonic tools to pursue their truths.
In compiling this mystic assemblage, McGuire has made ambitious efforts to render not only multiple speakers and personas but also multiple modes or registers of address, as well as multiple (sometimes conflicting) influences. As individual poems, these are personal records of witness and exploratory instruments of perception; presented as a collection, they exhibit a set of rhetorical positions that accept risk and even invite criticism. In particular, a subsection of McGuire’s speakers adopt a critical mode of engagement with the represented world that is sparse, self-assured, and couched in both religious language of judgment and legalistic language of argument. Curiously, this is more or less what the poet Dana Gioia warns against, in a passage McGuire includes in the book’s front matter, which states in part: “When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation” (vi). The poems that shirk music for rhetoric are the major weakness in this collection, for they prime readers to engage with the book not as enchantment, but as argument—something the author of these poems about doubt and confusion in the end times may have never fully intended.
A short example is the eight-line poem, “Eyes,” whose speaker begins with an image of another subject (“Two eyes peer at me / Over the top of a mask” 29), adds two lines of detail about the mask, and then briefly engages in rhetorical questions to make a point:
Are the lips smiling?
Are the lips stretched in a frown?
Or, worse than either, are those
Hidden lips ambivalent? (29)
The final two lines critique ambivalence as “worse than either” (29) alternative, without providing more context than the images of a smile, a frown, and a mask. While it effectively celebrates conviction, this rhetorical link between specific moral statements and broadly charged symbols also assumes some risk: not only for the reader who would interpret an endorsement of prior (and perhaps harmful) behaviors and beliefs as being better than nothing, but also for the reader who would respond to unmusical and self-righteous argument with heightened scrutiny.
For the many passages in the book that critique ambivalence, portray sin, and implicitly exhort to action, there are relatively few that offer an alternative vision or a set of actions for engaging with a world in crisis. Does this implicitly condone a faith without works, contrary to the biblical injunction in the book of James? Should the nascent mysticism being articulated in parallel with this reading of the world be understood as a response, a companion, a symptom—or perhaps even a cause, in which retreat to the subjective comfort of right faith accelerates, through wider inaction, the downfall of a wrong world? To what degree is the Anthropocene subject wrongfully absolved of responsibility by poems that refashion tropes of the earth as an immutable and ineluctable system, given what climate science shows us about the impact of humankind?
By stepping first into the realm of argument, the author has invited these questions and more. Although each reader must judge the rhetorical risks for themselves, the poetic reward of this approach remains: a cohesive blend of different moods and tones, balancing critical urgency with contemplative remove, vulnerable guilt, and prophetic reverence. To adequately represent such a range of feeling is one major goal of many apocalyptic poetry collections, and the formalist landscape of Apocalypse Dance achieves it in a highly original way. While his idiosyncratic approach may be most appreciated by specialists—philosophers of Christian faith, historians of human ecology, and lovers of poetic form—all readers who call planet earth home ought to be encouraged by the arrival of McGuire’s distinct and promising poetic voice, as well as the prospect of what he will use it to say next.
Apocalypse Dance by Ethan McGuire was published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock, in 2025.
D.W. Baker is a poet from St. Petersburg, Florida. His poems appear in Identity Theory, Amethyst Review, and New Verse Review, among others, while his reviews appear in Variant Lit, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, Vagabond City, and more. See more of his work at www.dwbakerpoetry.com