My Infinity

“I am good with secrets,” Jackson confesses early in her subtle latest (after Moon Jar). She makes good on that statement in poems that detail the secrets of the departed, including roadkill, “recently dead butterflies,” a fallen bird (“limp feathered envelope”), and a “husband’s body still marred/ from what he had done/ to himself.” Death is mysteriously tinged with beauty in these poems, especially those that respond to and converse with the Swedish artist and spiritualist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). “The yellow bloomed/ like a beautiful atomic bomb,” Jackson writes in “De Fem (The Five),” inhabiting one of Klint’s jewel-toned, geometric canvases. Elsewhere, she reckons with great tragedy: “wild sibyl, my sister,/ a piece of the fire inside of me that blew away.” “Like Hilma,” she wants “to decode it all,/ but I’ll never know why/ my late husband took his life” (“The Tree of Life”). The question of why haunts this stirring collection, giving voice to the human instinct to seek answers from the dead. These poignant poems will linger in readers’ minds. (Sept.)