Best Poetry Books of 2009 - Matthew Thorburn

Matthew Thorburn's selection:

Displacement by Leslie Harrison (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Chosen by Eavan Boland for the Bakeless Prize, Leslie Harrison’s first book vividly renders the aftershocks and fallout when love is displaced by betrayal, then anger and regret. “No map for how to live past this,” Harrison writes, but these poems map out the unfolding days and nights of that new life. They are, by turns, bitter and hopeful, angry and funny, sly and wise. Physically as well as emotionally uprooted, the speaker of these poems has gone off into the country, in order to gain the distance needed to see the world again – to gain a deeper perspective and a steadier hold on life, both her own and the capital-L Life of the larger, wilder world. “This is the address of distance,” Harrison writes, “where distance came to live // in the seefar longlight in the shining day.”

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Matthew Thorburn is the author of a book of poems, Subject to Change, and a recently published chapbook, the long poem Disappears in the Rain. He lives in New York City and writes about writing at Elsewhere