Old Stranger

The observant sixth collection from Larkin (Blue Hanuman) offers an extensive miscellany while continuing the poet’s career-long interest in the body. “The body/ inside me is all thumbs,” she admits, and “My body,/ too, is a sealed record:// violence buried in stone/ I’m quarried from.” Poems inspired by musical instruments, objects, artworks (by Pierre Bonnard, Camille Claudel, Paula Moldersohn-Becker, Wayne Theibaud), animals, and linguistic characters (“Hyphen,” “Ampersand”) interweave with reflections on painful memories (“the abortion/ that’s haunted my whole life”). The title poem describes the speaker’s reunion with a long-lost knife, “dark haft, trio of nickel silver/ rivets like moons of Pluto, thin blade stained as before,” an apt metaphor for the book’s interest in writing as a weapon and tool, by turns delivering incisive wit and dislodging memories, “rak[ing]/ joy onto my plate while the gauze/ that wrapped my cut, reddened.” Meditating on a lost mitten, the aging poet asks, “Will there be time (the thought/ blew past) to own another pair?” Amid losses, restitutions, sudden joys, and unknowns, this volume sustains an appealing verve. (Aug.)