Magician-like, the poet tunes language fragments from an out-of-print book to the pitch of a piece of political rhetoric, ordering the words to soothe, evoking rain. “What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.” So Wallace Stevens reminds us it is the poet’s responsibility to interpret the world. But what happens when the physical, emotional, and historical extend through …