What Was Lost

In this, his first collection since the acclaimed Little Voices of the Pears, Herbert Morris gathers fifteen recent poems in his two signature modes, the dramatic monologue and the meditative reverie. His subjects include a resplendent apricot gown once worn by Lillian Gish ("Chaplin enthralled, Griffith smitten, ecstatic"); a poignant human detail in Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac; and a host of variations on the Peaceable Kingdom, the obsessive lifework of the painter Edward Hicks. Mr. Morris's blank verse, for decades now a glory of American poetry, here achieves a new level of mastery.