Breaths' Burials (New Directions Paperbook)

The poems in Gustaf Sobin's newest collection, Breaths' Burials, establish a dialogue with silence. Breath, its syllables buried in the resonant space between the word and the void, unlocks "the gloriole, the ring of things released." Whether Sobin is writing about irises, Venetian architecture, or the wind-blown plateaus of his adopted Provence, his poems are not more nor less than a search in the redemptive, celebrating the regeneration of language out of itself. Breaths' Burials once again confirms the praise of Robert Duncan, who described Sobin's work as "a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarifies renewed."