In his new poetry collection, Forests of the Medieval World, Don Coles explores the power of memory. Shadowy figures from the past -- a woman in a car, a child at the seashore, a father’s college basketball teammates -- float through the poems of the book’s first section. A modern tale of love is intertwined with an account of the destruction of Europe’s medieval forests. The poet recalls the baseball games and adventure books of his boyhood; he dreams of what death would be like for Cambridge University’s Wren Library; and he listens to ‘long-dead fathers’ giving counsel to ‘their troubled daughters’ in a nursing home. Rounding out the volume is a haunting sequence of poems about the private world of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.