A master at work …

… Rhina Espaillat and the Lyre of Orpheus . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

To call And After All yet another outstanding book of poetry from one of America’s best poets, working in traditional form, would be misleading—because something new is going on in these poems. They adhere to the rules of traditionalist prosody, as do the great majority of Espaillat’s poems, but these are experimenting poems, they are seeking poems, and putting hypothesis to the test. These are poems written from necessity; they are meant to address a problem, to find the answer to a pressing question. The poet hasn’t the time or patience to entertain untested answers meant to placate, or to divert attention. She needs to arrive at a proven answer to her question: How to stem the tide of loss, a tide that threatens to pull her under?