You've Just Been Told: Poems

Elizabeth Macklin, whose poems have been described by The New Yorker as "graceful and halting, quartzlike in precision," contemplates the grammar of loss. Here, in Elizabeth Macklin's second collection, an only child's responses to the fait accompli of childhood--decisions already made, accidents of history and family, patterns preset--come to the adult mind in the presence of change and grief. The mind regroups as it can: "later light on the hills of houses / before us / just as they are, as versus none."