The Accounts

Stark, smart, funereal, terrifying at times, this second volume from Peterson (This One Tree), one of two volumes of her poems coming out this month, addresses the death of her mother, without confining itself to her, or to any, biography. Instead, careful scenes—cemeteries, domestic interiors, the fields where the dead reside—support Peterson’s impossible search for a way to give mortality lasting meaning. That search gets energy, too, from recurrent props, such as a claw-footed table, and from bizarre one-off symbols, such as the 18th-century “cat harpsichord” which made music by pulling cats’ tails. Peterson’s is a careful, serious poetry, difficult in the way that real life is difficult, but clear and chilly as a long-held regret, and pared-down in its choice of words, which come close (at times too close) to the wiry sadness and clipped free verse of Louise Glück. Early on, Peterson recalls “You carrying me into a lake in August,/ the summer my mother left the earth.” Peterson’s emotional intelligence lets her understand the limits of sympathy, but it also lets her speak for inanimate objects, in a way that could speak to us all. “What I am made of/ whispers, frays, is shed,/returns to the ground again,” says a talking nest, in Peterson’s longest poem: “I contained/ life,/ and it/ flew.” (Sept.)