Poetry. "I've been an admirer of Craig Beaven's poetry for years; for its deep focus as well as its immaculate craft. In NATURAL HISTORY the poet's domestic life--impending parenthood and marriage--is often in the foreground, but in the background of these poems is a deep, unsettling sense of history and time itself that haunts. NATURAL HISTORY is a deeply American, wonderfully accessible collection of poems, in voice, but it carries as well a freight of uncommon depths and shadows."--Tony Hoagland