Things That Were Only Briefly the Truth by Lara Adams Gaydos

Here is a book full of beautiful things – fountains, an antique copy of “Paradise Lost,” tiger lilies, geraniums, Van Gogh’s wheat fields, dragonflies, the Big Dipper– but notice the title, “Things That Were Only Briefly the Truth.” Lara Adams Gaydos is a poet that understands impermanence, and the menace found in the smallest of events, a child’s loose tooth, or in the largest, North Korea’s nuclear testing. “My dryer could catch fire any moment,” Gaydos writes in the ironically titled “Good Housekeeping.” But though schooled by loss from an early age and recognizing that “some shadows are best left alone,” Gaydos returns us again and again to the transcendent, the capacity to expect magic from this world: “My daughters stretch themselves out/across the shadowy lawn, certain/that this time when they reach/for the ladle/it will dip just enough/ and they’ll drink ice cold milk/straight from the sky.” Here is a poet who satisfies an old and sacred thirst in us.

–Christopher Bursk, author of “The Improbable Swervings of Atoms”

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]