Early Autumn

"Early Autumn"--the title derives from a plaintive jazz ballad with lyrics by Johnny Mercer--is framed by two long poems dealing with different aspects of loss. "Elegy for My Brother"--dedicated to the memory of the musician and visual artist Joel O'Brien--is both a confrontation with the physical process of dying and, in its second part, a description of the afterlife that subsists in memory, dream, and art.

The book's final poem, "The Ruins of a Long Gallery Illuminated Through a Hole in Its Vault," is the expansive account, framed as an unbroken sentence, of a single moment: in looking at an 18th-Century painting of an ancient ruin, a kind of condensed world history is set in motion, moving through layers of experience and fantasy to come face to face with the recent catastrophe of the September 11 attack in the form of wreckage outside the poet's window in New York.