Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine: Seeing the world clearly and translating those perceptions into equally clear language ought to be something anyone can do, but of course that’s not the case. Fortunately, we have poets like Patrick Phillips who remind us how important it is to “be present, and watching, / and silent as stars.”
Sandra Lim, The Wilderness: “Feeling atonal and unconciliatory, / I went to see The Rite of Spring,” Sandra Lim writes, and The Wilderness does have the feel of someone wrestling with a difficult, not entirely pleasurable performance. “Spring obliges / my imagination / of return,” she observes in another poem, “then / annihilates it.”
Michael Longley, The Stairwell: The first half of The Stairwell contains Michael Longley’s usual paeans to Carrigskeewaun, the windswept townland on the west coast of Ireland he has celebrated for decades. Part Two is an elegy for the poet’s twin brother, a form in which Longley, like many an Irish poet before him, thrives.