In this beautiful anthology, the poetry editors of the literary journal Tin House
have cherry-picked from the magazine's past contributors. Representing the establishment are venerable poets such as Sharon Olds, Charles Simic and Donald Hall. Hall's poems are heartbreaking meditations on loss, containing the ghostlike presence of his late wife and muse, the poet Jane Kenyon: “The months of absence hurry./In sleep I touch her skin/And wake in the stain of dawn, in fury.” Among the younger poets are two who continue to draw wider attention: Matthea Harvey, who has a brilliant knack for whimsically relaying the everyday oddity of the contemporary world, and Christian Hawkey, who conveys some of the widespread feeling of helplessness: “I will sit down in the middle of an intersection.../ & pour gasoline over my head,/ & gaze up at the clean white object of a gathering cloud.” Poetry in translation also has a strong presence, through Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and the late Yehuda Amichai, among others. Also adhering to the magazine's dictum to showcase both the very well known beside up and comers, this book gathers poems that are never self-indulgent, occasionally political, often intimate and in many cases timely, both universal and approachable, such as the title poem by Ben Doller: “When I bend back to look at the satellite convulsions, I/ am an aqueduct for twilit rain.” (Nov.)
