Collected Poems

These poems, collected from eight books dating back to 1976, establish Voigt as one of the most proficient and accomplished poets writing today. Infusing narrative with lyric power, these precise, yet visceral entries engage with ordinary people in their strangeness, as well as with animals domesticated and wild. As a Virginia farmer’s daughter reckons with the implicit racism of her childhood, she posits the unpleasantness as an “instructive poison” that can inoculate one against subscribing to such notions. No stranger to the brutalities of farming, she pictures the chaos of cows being prepared for slaughter: “one beast/ mounts another in a panic that looks erotic.” Disrupted marriages proliferate; a betrayed wife’s heart is a “hinged clam” with “an appetite for garbage.” “Kyrie,” a prescient sonnet sequence about the 1918–1919 flu epidemic, is sandwiched between more personal narratives, but each poem achieves, through earned emotion and vision, broader impact. A trained pianist since childhood, Voigt is a musician at heart and a formalist who rarely works in received forms. This rewarding and expansive work does justice to her commendable vision and ear. (Feb.)