Up Late

September 18, 2023
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.”

October 15, 2023
Laird has written novels, screenplays, and criticism, but he is best known as a poet and is now the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast. The life documented in his fifth collection has not been easy. His trenchant "American Poem" begins, "I also hoped to visit tropical resorts / to feel the texture of expensive sadness." The costly sadness of gated tropical resorts is distinct from the Forward Prize-winning title poem, an elegy-sequence for his father; and Up Late's first poem is "Grief." Laird has always made every line break seem natural, necessary. Yet one feels some unease about his supreme facility. As a transatlantic poet, he name-checks the right neighborhoods in New York City, exudes a distinctly hip take on city life, parenting, and "The Politics of Feeling," which is both better and worse than its title--better for its impolitic meditation on race, worse for its facile last line ending with a predictable expletive. One is left wanting more, but the grief is real.

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October 23, 2023

In his fifth collection (after Feel Free), the Northern Irish poet and novelist Laird strikes a deeply elegiac note, exploring the metaphysical dimensions of solitude, time, space, and impermanence ("Even living/ you are tearing through something made not/ of particles but of the relations between them") with an awareness born of lived experience and, most acutely, his father's death. But though the 12-page title poem in memory of the departed loved one occupies center stage in the book ("Impossible to grieve/ and not know the vanity of grief"), Laird sees his personal loss as symptomatic of something much larger, what he calls the "permacrisis...the era of collapsing systems" that envelops the planet itself, "the lacerated earth/ attempting now to shake us off." The practice of poetry, of course, provides a sense of permanence in the midst of chaos ("I want poem to destroy time"), and Laird can still find pleasure in "the art of introducing words/ that haven't met." VERDICT While the poems in the last third of the book seem a shade lighter than those preceding them, this collection offers readers a satisfyingly rich palette of imagery and insight.--Fred Muratori

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