Circle Back

In his tender fifth collection, Clay (To Make Room for the Sea) blends ecological grief, loss, and a deep appreciation for life in the Anthropocene, which is all the more wondrous for its fragility. He presents remarkably evocative scenes that could easily trigger despair, or even horror, but instead engender awe, such as driving past a wildfire with his daughter and locking eyes with cattle in a tractor trailer: “the cows,/ as the traffic crawled, looked/ at us with the wisdom and grief/ of an earlier time. It could flood/ or it could never rain again,/ their eyes remain unchanged.” A few poems pay homage to Clay’s friend and fellow poet, Matthew Henriksen, who died in 2022. “The Bar in Fayetteville Where All the Moms Now Drink” conveys the ambivalence one feels upon encountering an old haunt that has become something new, and the gut-punch of remembering a person and a time that is irretrievable: “Even now, I can see Matt/ shooting pool, looking like a muscle/ of trouble that could never unravel.” These poems are brilliant reminders that it is always better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (Mar.)