Michael Boughn

How unafraid these thinking loving poems are as they explore memory’s grief and delight, hommages for Robin Blaser – not about, but to a beloved friend and mentor. Boughn’s interlinked meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that. —Peter Quartermain