My Destination

My Destination, Daisy Fried's fifth book, explores renewal amid great loss - a struggle as common as rain. As full of lived life as ever, as formally various, and as wide-ranging in both subject and tone, these poems are sophisticated and indecorous, unsentimental and sharp. Fried's elbows are always out, her gaze unaverted, her treatment of her subject sometimes frontal and sometimes oblique, whether she's trying to get language to slow things down or make them go faster; to stop change in its tracks or, failing that, to represent with vividness, accuracy, and quizzical attention 'the shake,' as Fried writes, 'between you and me.' This is a collection for fans of Hannah Sullivan and any other poet who understands both the humour and the pity in everyday things.