After Earth: Poems

The poems from this collection are simply beautiful. Michael's work in After Earth doesn't conform to modern convention—rather, his poems seems to unfold in language and style that feels natural and familiar, as if it's been with (and part of) us all along, yet never captured on paper until now.

Too difficult to pick just one favorite, but below are the titles of some of my top selections.

Instead of a Lullaby
Andromache's Lullaby
Coda
The Task
Will Exult over You with Loud Singing
Patmos Revisited
Invective against Stars
The Rustle of Hemlock
That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die


Favorite passage:
(only selected this one because it's a beautiful sonnet and short enough to fit here)

Coda

From the garden rose the sound of bees
that lurched and wobbled through the peonies.
We ate eggs and toast with milk that warmed
in minutes in the sun while fat drones swarmed
and looped like bullets misfired from the fields.
It was the sound the mind makes when it yields
to glutted blood. I didn't understand,
until one smelled the syrup on your hand,
and in a gold-encrusted drunken strut,
smeared pollen from its mandibles and gut
along your wrist. That morning you had tied
your hair, and as you rose and ran inside,
it gently bounced, and loosed, and then unfurled.
If the next is better, I'll still miss this world.