Book excerpt: The finely crafted poems of Cornelia Hornosty's Ordinary Days celebrate the cotidian with the deceptive informality of Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts. Anything but ordinary, Hornosty's latest volume documents a personal journey of growth, love and loss with the wry detachment of a silent witness carefully noting atmosphere, nuance and gesture. Events, people and scenes described from the outside reveal their essence through language that is casual and precise against the relentless rhythm of successive moments. Conversational yet strangely classical, the poems of Ordinary Days lull the reader into tranquil awareness only disturbed by an unexpected intensity, reverberating with a lasting echo.