Near Death

Chris Banks is moved by how Mark Callanan's new poems cope with "the terrifying fact of one’s mortality":

Callanan’s brush with death in the form of a medical emergency a few years ago has made him less inclined to talk about it in terms of anything except as a gift. There is a real humility to his poems, which reaffirm life’s uncertainties rather than bolstering the grandiose claims Keats made for poetry as a physic for all the hurts of the world.