World as You Left It

Poetry. "WORLD AS YOU LEFT IT, Helen Wickes' fourth poetry collection, is an extended elegy for her parents, her childhood, and the farm where she grew up. These poems are both exquisitely down-to earth and open to the realms of myth and memory. With lyric ease, they blend anger, praise, and love for an imperfect, loss-riven world. In the final section, a new kind of knowledge, beyond biography, transforms this book into a memory palace for the poet's mother and father: 'You couldn't tell / them apart, light from place, they inhabited the mind / so deeply, light that sculpted September evenings, / those two people mowing here, raking there, // the glow that warmed their faces as they puttered / around their world.'"—Murray Silverstein