The Hyacinth Letter

In the quietest of ways it is concerned with the largest of themes. It has-perhaps from Celan, Dickinson, and Niedecker-this astonishing ability to make of the emotions an elemental space. In this way, the relational concerns that course throughout the series of poems become not merely interpersonal in nature, but oddly, subtly, gently, cosmic. That allows “night” and “darkness” to gain the phenomenological importance they here carry, but allows them to be realized in the poem not through any theoretical apparatus, but through a sense of intimacy, through the personal. That is a true gift-and one given to the reader in the most accessible of ways. There are very few poets writing today (that I know of at any rate) so invested in the metaphysical and writing in that tradition with such lightness.