Let me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills. There’s something in the air, something I can’t quite see, Hiding behind this stock of images, this language Culled from all the poems I’ve ever loved. John Koethe’s remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time’s relentless “slow approach to anonymity and death.” This perceptive, luminescent work—of all Koethe’s books, probably his most human and various—includes meditative lyrics, a long poem on time and experience, public poems, some of them political, as well as a group of vivid and conversational poems.