In her third collection, Carol Moldaw explores new territory in poems that are thematically far-reaching and technically superb. The book includes three long sequences based on art and artifact in various stages of completeness: preliminary pen-and-ink studies, Turkish ruins, and, at the center, the site-specific art installation that gives the book its title and impetus. Attracting charged material as a lightning field attracts lightning, the poems reference narrative but move beneath and beyond it through a restless and rewarding insistence on making and remaking, on seeing by degrees and...

Here are poems of intelligent consideration and a deft and heart-born music, filled with the gleam of particularity and a lushness of language and substance.--Jane Hirshfield Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars, Carol Moldaw constructs poetry of imaginative daring that illuminates and transforms the life within us all. In So Late, So Soon, oblique, wily, and intensely intelligent poems repeatedly achieve, to quote from The New Yorker, lyric junctures of shivering beauty. Aurally rich, structurally varied, inventive, and sensually textured, these are poems at once passionate and...