Sunderland

Pritchett's poems manage a level of lyric statement that recalls both Rilke's Duino Elegies and the late poems of Robert Creeley, as the author asks, "May I ruin the poem's / promise with the promise / of another poem / the yet-to-come / forever shining / nickel sweet beyond / horizon's oblivion." Written under the sign of COVID and the attendant global violences related to a pandemic, Sunderland meditates in ardent, necessary, and ethical ways on the "real wonder of the world in its ruin." Both a work of daily apprehension and one sundered from topical realities, Pritchett's work here is invested in poetry's requisite and long-historied demand, asking us "to undergo lyric / as though it were a curse."