They Lift Their Wings to Cry

Brooks Haxton’s poetry has celebrated for thirty years our troubled pleasures in the daily world. This new collection, titled after a meditation on the cry of the snowy tree cricket, gives us his most moving response to the ferocious beauty of nature and to the folly and magnificence of human undertakings.

In the opening poem, the poet comes home drunk without his key, collapses in the yard, and looks up to where, he says:
Whorls of a magnetic field exfoliated under the solar wind,
so that the northern lights above me trembled. No: that was the porch light blurred by tears.

With this self-deprecating wit and tenderness toward human failings, these poems search through history into the wilderness of our origins, and through the self into the mysterious presences of people we love.

A master of moods—as when a poem of grief after the death of a friend becomes a sprightly litany of her favorite wildflowers—Haxton is a poet who summons essences of thought and feeling in a few words, creating both narratives and miniatures that are rich in possibility beyond the page.

ISAAC’S ROOM, EMPTY, 4 A.M.

From the dark tree at his window blossoms battered by the rain fell into the summer grass, white horns, all spattered down the throat with purple ink, while unseen birds,
with creaks and peeps and whistles, started the machinery of daybreak.

Publishers Weekly

Haxton's stripped-down, careful appreciations of flora, fauna and man-made things make him a reliable witness to what life gives and to what life takes away. Haxton's upstate New York locale gives him a good look at the harsh seasons, and at the beauty their procession brings: "berries/ of a bluebeard lily, blue as sapphires,/ blue with frost and poison." Haxton is capable of a fine wit: one poem pays comic homage to comic poet Kenneth Koch by imagining a fight between Rambo and Rimbaud. Usually, though, Haxton (Uproar) remains unadorned, thoughtful and sad. A poem called "Blast at the Attic Window" presents, "Inside a spinning cloud/ of stars, the mind/ in an intricate swirl of ice." Another, one of many about intimacy in advancing age, imagines what happens after "Her High School Flame Retires at 65 and Moves Back into His Childhood Home." It is not all downhill in this collection, nor is everything wintry: an unrhymed sonnet, lovely in its slight archaism, brings Haxton and his wife "Face to Face," as flattering "Sunlight under your eyebrow knits/ the iris into a bronzen veil."
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