Moon Grammar

In the opening poem of Matthew Porto's dazzling debut collection, we hear the voice of the recurring angel figure for the first time, commanding us to "Get used to the light." That light-blinding, mysterious, unsettling, but occasionally illuminating-shows up again and again in Porto's taut, elegant poems. As he writes in another poem: "Some light, it's true, makes it to us, but always / refractory, errant, struggling to deign downward."    The occasions for these poems range from enco