Best Man

Poetry. In this powerful sequence of poems, Owen Lewis bravely revisits the death of his younger brother in 1980, trying to make what sense he can of inexplicable loss. He summons his brother by ‘taking every memory that [comes] to me like a hand in the dark, ’ by listening attentively to what his brother’s spirit might be saying from beyond the grave, and by speaking back to him and offering him a troubled but loving place in the poet’s current life. Like the dune fences that make up one of the sequence’s motifs, these poems are stays against confusion that, paradoxically, do not attempt to fully wall out that confusion but, instead, let it in: ‘Enough slats / to keep things together, but still / some sand pours through.’ The result is a poetry that is deeper and more moving, open both to pain and vision.–Jeffrey Harrison