The Year of Adverbs

Arriving eight years after the poet's last prize-winning offering, this collection explores the stuff of daily life, fizzing with personalities and alive with incidents. Traveling from New Zealand to Paris and back again, the poems trace a wedding, a birth, and several deaths, and offer revealing glimpses of Fats Waller, Eliza Bennet, Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Featuring such imagery as a horse playing an accordion, the compendium adeptly showcases the poet's verbal playfulness, distinctive wit, and unique style.