As I read Eileen Cleary’s 2 a.m. with Keats, I felt breathless, suspended in a place of red keys, plum stones, cats, willows, and sphinxes. It would minimize the reach of this brilliant collection to call it an elegy or a eulogy, or even a love story to Lucie Brock-Broido or John Keats - though it is all of those things. Here, in this place where the elm says Grief and the oak, Grief, the poems shine and scatter across the pages like a phantom of stars. Cleary engages the rhythms of another world, of sweet music honeyed and unheard, where Lucie reaches forty years back… .

Embracing the quirkiness of Brock-Broido’s imagery and the love of Keats’s line, Cleary creates a seance of astronomy, searching for the origins of human and poetic magic, where looking for signs means I’ve / once been broken. I will return to 2 a.m. with Keats again and again, to remember Lucie and Keats, to inhale rose milk … mint. - Jennifer Martelli, author of In the Year of Ferraro