Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy

Klink%E2%80%99s fourth collection is a passionate but controlled lyric meditation on time, intimacy, memory, and the increasingly imperiled natural world. Reminiscent of (and drawing on) Eliot%E2%80%99s Four Quartets and Rilke%E2%80%99s Duino Elegies, the poems here announce, "I brought what I knew about the world to my daily life/ and it failed me." Klink (Raptus) moves through a litany of personal, human, and civilization-level errors toward a future both unknown and unsure. "I knew every occasion%E2%80%94the music rising off the piano,/ held in the air in plumes of distraction, sometimes rich, sometimes scaled to terror," she writes, acknowledging that "No one knew what was coming." Klink can be grandiose in her use of pronouns, but her poems of longing never lack beauty ("your hand catching the bone of my hip/ filled our aloneness"). Yet, the real stars of the book, and those most moving in their intensity, are her elegies for the nature that sustains us: "Even the greenest city may become a reef./ Take nothing more from each other." American poetry sorely needs poets willing to address such large topics in a mode like this. "If there is a world," Klink writes, "let me be in it." (Apr.)