by Catherine Jagoe

Poet Max Garland’s quiet and profound fourth collection uses themes of the pandemic—isolation, distance, time, breath—to approach the existential question of how to live with the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die. Into the Good World Again is haunted not just by the “lethal math of plague,” but by the brevity, fragility, and loneliness of human life. “Soon enough,” Garland writes, “the breath of air that shaped itself / into the syllables of my name will be elsewhere / and otherwise.”

In a way, Garland is a contemporary Metaphysical poet, and indeed he alludes to Andrew Marvell while keeping vigil in “What’s Left For You To Say?”:

this slag of earthly light, this world
enough and time to watch the one
you’ve loved the longest raft away.

Alongside his preoccupation with mortality, love, and religion, Garland’s cosmic vision encompasses both the galactic and the infinitesimal, the “300 million worlds / in the habitable zones of sunlike stars” and the “outer shell of the carbon atom.” Grit as a motif resurfaces throughout Into the Good World Again, a grit connected to both the small life forms that often operate in darkness (worms, zebra mussels, crayfish, morels) and to the “grit of the ongoing” in the human world, where change and suffering “may be the Bible.”

Time in this book is elastic and nonlinear, compressed to a mere blink (an image Garland uses in several poems) and infinitely expansive. It is destructive and consoling at once, since it softens jagged shards into “the rounded shape of the shining world.” Each human life contains ongoing pasts—and Garland’s own memories are conjured with extraordinary cinematic clarity in poems such as “Morels,” which uses mushroom imagery to link the shape of the now-dead elms of mid-century America, the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, and the “small dark churches” with “convoluted steeples” of morels writhing in a pan.

Garland’s vivid evocations of place and time sometimes resemble those of Dylan Thomas; he works with controlled use of alliteration and judiciously chosen line breaks:

But there was no crossing the river without dead-
dragging home behind—caved-in creekbank,
brick thick Bible, the habit
of hunkering in the presence
of whatever glittered godlike and won.

His style is notable for a lucid musicality that feels hard-won, achieved by distillation. Fittingly, he lives in a city named Eau Claire (“clear water”), and his writing is similarly deep and crystalline, returning again and again to light, water, bedrock. The tone is typically controlled but illuminated now and again by glimpses of gorgeous lyricism: “Kingfishers, like exiled gods, / patrol the varieties of glitter”; “the landscape shook loose like a ribbon”; “light / through the windows was briefly honey.” There are also flashes of humor, as when Garland notices his peers’ aging skin “randomly splotched and riddled / as if scrawled by a drunken cartographer” or the mouse in his trailer who every night “climbed his sink pipe, / and sank his teeth into the soap.”

The closing couplet in “Ocracoke” encapsulates Into the Good World Again: “The deeper the listening, / the richer the world.” We are fortunate indeed that Garland is listening.

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