Halcyon Ghosts

Halcyon Ghosts presents 13 poems—13 shapes of knowing—from the cinematic reel “The Kid,” splicing stills of the poet’s grandmother and Charlie Chaplin, to the re-verse soundings of “Six Reels of Joy,” celebrating the birth of the poet’s daughter. The title poem displays a ghostly counterpoint of birds and words in flight; strikethrough poems are threaded through with runes of fact and fiction. Language, Sampson demonstrates, is as particular and transitory as the patterning of the natu…