Exceeds Us

The collection takes its title from a line in Rilke's second Duino Elegy, and that line's sense of the heart reaching past what we can hold runs through the whole book. Its central concerns are a new love and an illness that lies beneath it, approached through lyric poems about human existence within the natural world, with constant awareness that such existence is brief.

The poems move loosely across the boundary between waking life and dream, often resisting the idea that time moves in a straight line. Yet they remain firmly grounded in the earth, its soil and its bodies of water. In these pages a boy may turn into a field, and a girl may find herself submerged in the waterways of her own body. The voice shifts between close, personal address and a much wider view, and the poet is concerned with language, with careful attention to small details, and with asking questions.

Drawing on Rilke's musing about love and departure, and on what kind of substance such feelings might be made of, the book suggests that a human life is never singular. Its poems reach beyond the central pair of lovers, beyond the single life each person is given, and beyond the laws that govern the earth.