Oz (Carnegie Mellon Poetry (Paperback))

A broomstick horse, clay marbles, WWII tin fighter plane, Cold War dollhouse with bomb shelter, "all the toys are vanishing," says Nancy Eimers in Oz, her fourth collection of poetry. These poems offer a paradoxical, moving elegy of things we left—or that left us—behind, not just the toys that grow obsolete, but a lost cat, a name, a monarch wing, a melting glacier, all the children at Terezín—an "immensity" that "recedes so incrementally we can't— / we just can't / put a human face on it." Eimers looks closely at what we lose and how we let go of it, sorrowfully or with secret relief, or some irresoluble hope of recovery.