Feel Free
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize
“Nick Laird’s dazzling poems arrive with a kind of revolutionary candor; a truth-telling that’s political, existential, and above all, emotional.… Feel Free is essential poetry.”—Terrance Hayes
Feel Free, the fourth collection from acclaimed poet Nick Laird, effortlessly marries the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird’s forebears Heaney, MacNeice, and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention, and wit, Laird explores the patterns of freedom and constraint—the family, the impress of history, the body itself—and how we might transcend them. Always daring, always renewing, Feel Free is Laird’s most remarkable work to date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Laird's precise, energetic fourth collection (after Go Giants), his chief poetic gift an intimate voice of mixed vernaculars that gets inside the reader's head is on full display. Whether bedside with his children, walking "a scrubby acre at Creggandevesky," watching a sea bass that eyes him from a plate, or navigating traffic en route to his dying mother in hospice, Laird's line has musical integrity and strength. Infusing the intensity of childhood with the sorrow of losing a parent, Laird explores this timeless subject in "The Folding," in which he folds paper snowflakes with his children. Here, childhood and parenthood are presented as the same thing, reversed. Before the poem concludes with a gorgeously described snowy day, it observes "that infinite complexity's composed/ by simple rules." Similarly, another standout poem in the collection, "The Vehicle and the Tenor," rises to the manic threshold of grief, the devastating reality of his mother's dying, "beyond metaphor." Laird offers the reader a subtle, lasting meditation exploring the family as it was, as it is, or as it could be.
