Up Late

"The title poem of this new book by Irish poet Nick Laird is one of the finest elegies in my recent memory, a keening outcry over the death of the poet’s father. The urgent beauty of that poem inflects the taut, formal lyrics throughout the rest of the book, which take off from subjects as desperate and unlikely as Pac Man and a paperclip (“To bend inward forever/ shying from the world”). It’s not exactly a happy book, but since when have we come to poetry to get happy?"