A Several World

Winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets (2014)

As in the title phrase—borrowed from a 17th century poem by Robert Herrick—in which “several” is used to individuate, questions of singularity and the plural, of subjectivity and the collective, pervade this dream-quick poetry. In A Several World there are glimpses of an “us down here”—in a city state, in a valley town, in an open clearing, in the understory—and, by various projections, there is frequent a…