This folio of poems by Roger Craik opens with “[t]wo abrupt / raps at the door” of a speaker in the nursing home and looks at bearing with platitudes, “fractured silence” before literature and childhood, even as the “pale blue, smooth, identical” as a glass of water of Ruskin. “Pale blue” might be how I describe Craik’s poems, which pierce through the appearance of things, at funerals, nursing homes, prison, the speaker’s boxy bedroom with a clarity which allows us to grasp “this the hauntingness/ this the place to which, night after night, / the mind returns.”
Roger Craik is English by birth and educated at British universities, and lives in Ashtabula, Ohio. His poems have been published in England, Australia and America, in translation in Bulgaria, Romania, and Belarus, and he has written five full-length books of poetry, of which the most recent is In Other Days (2021)