RANSOM STREET

Millikin’s latest set of poems tackles difficult material in language that moves from the complex to the simple.

The past lives as a sequence of shadows and memories, leaving poets to put it into words. As the author writes in the opening poem, “Atlantic,” “I will go out / in my boat of language / because voice is not only a wound / but also a craft.” These poems reckon with landscapes, streets, and objects that are haunted by trauma and tragedy. “Pretty Dresses,” for example, ends on the image of one such item: “Traveling back roads into Georgia, we’d stop / where no one much lived, gas pumps by cinderblock / and cotton fields, me wearing grandfather’s jacket from the war.” The book mixes gritty, real-world imagery with dreamlike contrasts. One work, for instance, describes a rural taxi service and the philosophical feud between Friedrich Hölderlin and Martin Heidegger; another is about playing the Chinese board game Go as a way to survive a winter. Familiar themes of abandonment, isolation, and betrayal are all here, but they’re twisted into strange, melancholic songs of pine woods, railroad tracks, and old hotels. Along the way, Millikin tosses in erudite allusions to give mythic weight to memories: “As night is shaped of boxes, (Archimedean squares), / my grandfather built flimsy houses. / The nature of boxes is to be built of sky, / a supply from which my grandfather drew indiscriminately.” The long collection has a deeply immersive quality; the poems feel simultaneously confessional and guarded, and they offer different lessons than readers may expect at the outset. There’s also a cyclical quality to them, as in “As Snow Closes in the City”: “She is reading a story aloud in the bar / and you’re sure you’ve heard it before. / Snow closing the ways between buildings, / alleys, inlets, quays to harbor.”

A mournful, elegant collection that explores what one owes to the past.