Up Late
Poems
-
-
3.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
One of NPR's "Books We Love" in 2023
“Extraordinary.” —James Conor Patterson, Times Literary Supplement
Acclaimed poet Nick Laird reflects on the strange and chaotic times we live in with singular precision, clarity, and daring.
Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity, and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. These poems transport us from a clifftop in Ireland’s County Cork to a bench in New York’s Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo’s Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a London garden.
At the book’s heart lies the Forward Prize–winning title sequence, a profound meditation on a father’s dying at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reverberations of this knockout poem echo through the volume in its interrogations of inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retained. Amid rage, grief, and the conflagration of reality, Laird finds tenderness in the moments of connection that grow between the cracks and offers glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, where everything is still at stake and infinite.
Astonishing in its emotional range and intellect, Up Late is a powerful volume from an “exceptionally gifted poet” (Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The reflective fifth collection from Laird (Feel Free) continues the poet's career-long exploration of voice and sensibility. Grief is the book's central emotion and primary raison d'être: "I know nothing of your grief, granted,/ and you know nothing of mine, but isn't that why we're here?" At the center is a lyric sequence about the death of the poet's father during Covid lockdown. Moments of vivid detail accomplish the work of memoir ("Elizabeth the nurse held the phone against your ear/ and I could hear your breathing, or perhaps the rasping// of the oxygen machine, and I said what you'd expect"), giving rise to larger lessons learned about "the rituals that take us" and the art that preserves such rituals: "An elegy I think is words to bind a grief in,// a companionship of grief, a spell to keep it /safe and sound, to keep it from escaping." Other feelings weave around this grief, such as wonder at the sight of a sunset ("brilliant, splintered,/ overripe light toward animate clouds"), and the strain of ownership ("I was overwhelmed// then and am again by all the stuff, the bits and bobs, the clobber"). If at times the poet overplays his verbal wit, most readers will delight in poems that model how to attend to—and extend—"the custody of self."
