Book excerpt: August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise, wise, and sometimes madcap poems that are grounded in the wide array of places, people, and most especially voices he has encountered in his real and imaginative worlds. Snow Approaching on the Hudson is a collection that moves seamlessly through the often hypnogogic, porous realms of dreams, the past and present, inner and outer landscapes. His haunting, shifting atmospheres are peopled by characters, intimately portrayed, that are at one historical and invented. The poet's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, and his always masterful free verse conveys a life thoroughly lived and brilliantly perceived.