Foxglovewise

Mlinko’s sonically rich latest (after Venice) draws on familial intimacy, loss, and the search for deeper understanding in poems that deal with the death of a mother and its generational impact: “my relatives/ changed their amphibrachic name to Bass.” Mlinko is rarely less than dazzling thanks to the pleasure and rigor of her phrasing: “A seraglio of interior paramours”; “The lighthouse fruits like a bromeliad.” These layered, allusive, and intelligent poems are various in their tones and colors, doing much to ensure that they keep “the ear at right angles to the eye” (“The Empire of Flora”). Many walk a line between wit and meditation (“the Unreal Conditional the tragic tense,” or, as she writes elsewhere, “The coolness is applied to parts in pain”). There is a moving and unignorable sense of grief and loss beneath the surface, in an expertly managed balance with the luster of the vocabulary and music of these poems. Full of exquisitely observed internal and external landscapes (“I’ve been exiled to Paradise,/ it seems”), this is exemplary. (Jan.)