Shirley's third book—her first in the decade since Long Distance
(1996)—fuses the everyday and the otherworldly with mystifying precision. Haunted by dead friends and lost lovers, the speakers of these 28 neatly cast poems seek to grieve and make myths of the past in the vain hope of filling the spaces loss has left: "It didn't occur/ to me the emptiness would be permanent." Straightforward language tinged with surprising words ("...the view from our room of a meadow,/ dazzling & lacustral") and obsessively intense observations of nature ("...rhododendron leaves rattle their shredded gold") lends the poems a mournful, trancelike music. References to ancient Greek mythology provide stunning figures for the contemporary world: "...no one warned me about the countless/ tributaries of the Styx that skein through a life." What little hope there is derives from what small measures of control these speakers can exercise: "Bequeathed nothing by you,/ I must again begin saving or live less dearly." While the continual resifting of this material does reveal the secrets to some of its magic, Shirley has nonetheless crafted a powerful return to poetry. (May)
