In Hours of the Cardinal, a mother's death triggers poems that journey through grief into the unnamable origins of consciousness-before thought, talk, even printed words. These elegies weave stories and anecdotes from literature and the visual arts, literally trying to cheat death by facing it, even facing it down. The ghosts that take flesh in this collection are poets such as Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam, and Tu Fu, painters such as Max Ernst and Kahlo, the mystic Henry Vaughan, the singer-dancer Josephine Baker. By reprising these lives of exile and grief, the poems celebrate the body's attempt...