Allen Grossman's newest work Descartes' Loneliness blends the comic and tragic. As the writer Ha Jin once wrote, it is remarkable for the stout spirit of the speaker who dares to be funny while tackling such an austere subject as death. Poems such as The Famished Dead, where the poet is visited by lost loved ones, one at a time, confirm Jorie Graham's observation that from the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry to be heard--Grossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent.