After Earth

<p>Part elegy part ode part pastoral part sci-fi <em>After Earth </em>looks back through history in order to consider history's end. Many of the poems are drawn from the concerns of a father for his children from the impulse to record the Earth to preserve what's slipping away and to heal if poems can the bifurcation of nature and civilization. Reveling in the ornate as well as the plain these poems cultivate astonishment not in the promise of another world but in the here and now turning "what is is wavering or tattered into permanence" and praising all they can as Auden says we must “for being and for happening.”</p>