In his fourth book of poetry, Morbidity and Ornament, Steve Noyes departs from a previous preoccupation with the narrative sequence that he mined in Ghost Country to explore a range of styles and subjects: basketball, Islam, the dissonance and resonance of Chinese culture, the mating habits of slugs, the first year of marriage in a new house, ciagerette smoking and love poems that animals, strangely, inhabit. There are Petrarchan sonnets, poems in mock-Chaucerian middle English, a couple of surreal, winding, anxiety dreams, and a remarkable sequence that intersperses lyrics with homages to the Tang and Song dynasty poets, in Chinese and English. The book is a cornucopia that defies thematic arrangement. This collection is testament to Al Purdy's earlier observation that Noyes is "a damn good poet."