Next Day: New and Selected Poems

Zarin’s fine-tuned seventh collection (after Orbit) visits and revisits familiar themes of love and loss, regret and acceptance, childhood and motherhood. The poems are laced with references to Greek mythology, sketches of Italian life, the natural world (in particular, the seashore), and nursery rhymes. The collection includes sonnets, sequences, and several multipart poems. Little escapes Zarin’s eye; in “Looking for the Great Horned Owl in Truro Woods,” the speaker asks, “And then, what was more mysterious/ than us, crashing through the woods// to see a sound?” Baby cormorants in a painting are described as “small, feckless/ thunderclouds painted by a dabbler who/ wants to get everything in.” Zarin seems to search for self-knowledge when she urges, “Let my demons rage so I know who they are” (“The Muse of History”). “Ruby at Auction” closes with an image of “The largest ruby/ ever auctioned, outlasting love or sentiment.” Perhaps the key to Zarin’s work can be found in one of the collection’s newest poems, “Farewell”: “I filled the house/ with light, because it could not find/ me as the darkness could.” This skillful volume finds both light and darkness in abundance. (Aug.)