As Best We Can

As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Wainwright, history – personal and political – is alive in the present. The rendering of simple elements in 'The Window-Ledge', without commentary, is among his most lucid and radical poems. By effacing the 'I' he shares experience most fully with the reader, making and sharing a place.