`Tonight / I'll serenade you / With kisses / Modestly dressed...'

In Rank Songbirds, Leon Rooke deploys his considerable wit and his signature whimsy to explore the joys and the burdens, the hilarities and the anxieties of modern life.

These are poems that revel in a piercing look at foibles, saucy verbal sparring and the possibilities of artistic expression while recognizing the fallibility of humanity, with its voracious appetites, its complicit silences, its convoluted politics. And though it may be that `Those angels serenading us through / Hazardous night were rank songbirds chirping away / Mindless of hawks zooming overhead, ' these poems remind us that today isn't last week's curse, that freedom is getting the high notes right and that, in a pinch, one might `apply love's bandage to the shattered heart / This minute pooling blood about your feet.'