Hindsight (Poems)

Hindsight arises from a tormented time in our country’s history. Some poems contemplate the shocks of the COVID-19 assault. Others consider our nation, which is torn to pieces politically. The poems in this collection attempt to find a language to describe the breakage.

But political fracture occurs because of more fundamental dislocations: for this book, most crucially, spiritual. A search for forms of the sacred drives the whole collection. It’s a book of questions, not answers. In places, it struggles with the Christian story of sacrifice and crucifixion: a heretical attempt to make sense of suffering and of aggression. “Offices” and “Concerning ceremonies” borrow Christian liturgy to chart an experience of learning compassion. Each poem asks some version of the driving question from “Dead Flowers”: “What can be made of all this / grief.” Other poems turn to Judaism and Buddhism to see what wisdom they offer.

Beneath theology pulses the private life. These poems look into a personal past and try to weigh the moral meaning of experience. In “Hindsight,” the speaker discovers, “I could have / seen you better, I / know that now.” Who have we been as we struggled to grow up? Whom have we hurt? What does it mean to be conscious?

Hindsight elegantly embraces life writ large—larger than we are, sometimes violent, sometimes harshly beautiful—as ongoing instruction, in turn leaving the reader with a lyrical compass for orientation in our troubled moment.