Poems of nightfall

Poet Anne Elezabeth Pluto inhabits the dusky in-between spaces in her fifth collection of poetry, “The Deepest Part of the Dark” (Unlikely Books). She investigates the death of her mother, the death of a former love, the foreign grave of a long-buried multi-greated grandfather. “The dead sleep/ easily, grouped/ in threes, they do not/ mind us,” she writes. A simplicity and matter-of-factness is balanced with moments of delicate lyricism in lines saturated with haunt and located often at the shift to winter. She writes of an encounter with a family of raccoons; in these poems, “The night world was always open.” And in Pluto’s darkness exists a heat and glow, as when the “long lure of love burns/ celestial in the dark/ to domesticate the night,/ each star numerous/ in its power to assail us/ now, in our charter of rebirth.”

— Nina MacLaughlin - Boston Globe