From the book's title poem:
"Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin is 3,592 measures./A voice kept far from feeling is heard as measured./What's wanted in desperate times are desperate measures."
Hirshfield is able to deftly maneuver threads about the environment, the current status of politics in the United States, and personal tales into an enjoyable volume.
Some of the best poems in the collection are "Let Them Not Say":
"Let them not say: it was not spoken, it was not written./We spoke,/we witnessed with voices and hands."
And in "Today, Another Universe" the lines "Today, for some a universe will vanish/First noisily,/then just another silence" completely took my breath away. And then in "Wild Turkeys" "I, who am to myself also not meat, feed mosquitoes nightly" you can't help but chuckle lightly at the description. Who among us has not suffered at the hands of the tiny blood suckers?
There are so many small moments encased within the larger poems and larger sections, they are a joy to uncover on each subsequent page.
A definite read for any poetry lover!
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