Severance Songs Joshua Corey Tupelo Press, 2011 — Put anything in fourteen lines, and someone will call it a sonnet; although each poem in Joshua Corey’s third full-length collection, Severance Songs, shares that number of lines (often with visual variations that slide the tree line of the volta up and down the poems’ slopes), his poems are sonnet-like less for their containers than for the bright shapes they contain. The sense of a sonnet, these poems suggest, isn’t in formal configuration but in a manner of speaking, of talking to oneself, of talking things through. In Severance Songs, this manner reels through landscape to render the “pool of newsworthy airs” that “surrounds my perception.” For Corey, such perception typically comes from pastoral inspiration that he is both suspicious of (“Building sorrows / on a plan of pastoral affection”) and beholden to (“I do not reject terrain”). Early in the collection, a poem begins with a walk; throughout Severance Songs, one sees the record of a mind sent outside by some fever, and what it sees, …