the body | of space | in the shape of the human (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
Andrew Allport's debut collection is at once intensely personal and urgently civic. It is brilliantly studied in its lyricality and yet, somehow, almost feral in its sustained ferocity. The tonal confidence, elegiac feeling, and belief in the sustaining (if not the transcendent) properties of the lyric make this collection reminiscent of some of the essential  first books of the late century I'm reminded of Dugan'sPoems, Heaney'sDeath of a Naturalist, and Lowell'sLord Weary's Castle. This is august company indeed. --David WojahnTaking its emotional heart from Book VI of Augustine'sConfessions, the body | of space | in the shape of the humansounds a chord of universal loss through the personal, literary, and historical as it moves passionately from Lear and Keats to the creature world of horses, sparrows, and snow plants, refusing to stop, a baptismal current hungry and pure that leaves holes the size of eternity in the reader's heart. --Mark Irwin