After Earth begins in tenderness, in poems written to a child, moves to childhood memories of an adult, through elegies for those who have passed, moves out into the cosmos, reflects on history, taxonomy, natural environments and poetics, then constructs, at the very last, a continuing and moving memento to those pioneers who settled a province out of a wild western landscape. This book carries with it the beloved ghosts of Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Dante, Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, E. A. Robinson, and Stevens, which lend it genuinely beautiful gravitas. In his powerful and moving coda, "Works and Days," Michael Lavers writes: "the end must be / to cultivate perpetual astonishment." Well, the author has achieved exactly that, at least for this reader. His wonder at the achingly beautiful, the powerfully difficult, the dirt and silliness and nobility of our natures and our world is convincingly persuasive and wonderfully astonishing. -SIDNEY WADE

Michael Lavers's poems are colored with rich and startling precision. It's almost as if he has more crayons at his disposal than the rest of us. Rather than settle for a few popular primary colors, Michael has saved up his Canadian dimes and quarters (he's originally from Alberta) for the jumbo 120-crayon Crayola set, and he knows how to use every one: not just eggplant and raw sienna and antique brass, but colors we never knew existed--tumbleweed, outer space, manatee, and mango tango. By color, I mean his syntax and metaphor and voice--his poetics. Which he deploys in creating lyrical worlds both wild and domestic, with one foot in the tradition reaching back through the Romantics to the Ancients, and the other in the hurly-burly of right now. -LANCE LARSEN

Michael Lavers is a devotee of what his "Angel in Charge of Creating Earth" calls "the splendors / of the makeshift." After Earth abounds in moving, hard-won, understated revelations, regaling us along our way with such acutely observed phenomena as "chinooks smooth-talking small infinities /of wheat; of tar-tanged topsoil," and "dead pickups sunk in bluegrass / like stray mammoths stuck in tar." Here, "The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose" and "The pumpjack hammers out its slick / hexameter." These beautiful meditations, by turns celebratory, funny, mournful, and elegiac, make an exquisite, lyric truce with the human predicament. As the speaker of "Coda" tells us: "If the next is better, I'll still miss this world." -JACQUELINE OSHEROW