James Tate's latest book of poetry, The Ghost Soldiers, fights through the seemingly banal American terrain with a similar goal in mind. It begins with an epigraph from Stevens' "Esthetique Du Mal" -- "The paratroopers fall and as they fall/ They mow the lawn" -- and then takes the reader through 217 pages of a precisely lined prose poetry, one in which characters continually put themselves on the front lines of transmogrifying battles. These characters are not heroic, though, but achingly bumbling.