In his newest collection, Blind Rain, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time.

Bond opens with several elegies, many of which concern the last days and death of his father. Later poems explore the power of imaginative response as compensation for loss, focusing on poetry, madness, and music, which consoles...

In The Visible, we enter into a surreal landscape "where it is neither day nor night / but both at once," where light becomes an imaginative force that both illuminates and obscures. The illegible draws us closer to the page -- the visible revealed, paradoxically, by what we cannot see.

Though these formally restrained poems possess an abstract and introspective intensity, Bond grounds them in the everyday. Both vivid and speculative, the chiseled lyrics breathe. In "My Mother's Closet," the pages of medical books become holy and horrendous, "soiled at the corners, the mind's / terrific...

Blackout Starlight brings together a selection of poems from nine previously published books, along with a generous assortment of new work. At the heart of this collection are investigations of the role of eros, language, and creative life, and of the wonder and anxiety of their absence. In Bond s telling, the lines between real and unreal, living and dead, blur together in the poet s imagination, casting an equally compassionate eye upon the man we see writhing in the marble of an uncarved statue and the son at a funeral trying to face the other half of life, the part / without...