Revolving around the deaths of the poet s parents and first wife, The Clearing is a sustained meditation on the nature of love and its transformations. Perpetually dissatisfied with memory and what one poem calls the falsehoods about death we tell ourselves, White s poems turn on emotional openness and probing inquiry. How moving it is to find a book so haunted by tragedy and death that is, in addition, soberly life-affirming. A clearing is an empty space, but it is also a habit of mind, an act of clarification. Philip White knows pain s truths, the most awful of which is that the dead don t...