Memorizing the Wind

Odes, nocturnes, aubades-if Keats were still here, he'd want to have a conversation and a glass of claret with Deirdre O'Connor. These are gorgeous poems but not pretty poems. There's a fidelity to the often messy world, a fidelity to the messy truth that gives this book a rare, clear strength gracefully, even delicately applied. From the first lines "What wind is this, / turning the pear tree's blossoms/ to loose-leaf snow?/ What wind, pushing/ the semen scent through town," we see that this will be an unusual collection, one that weds the best impulses of the Romantics with the earthy, complicated, mucky "semen scented" world. What holds the book together even as it raises the stakes of the poems is the gorgeous music of the language.

-Leslie Harrison, author of Reck