This Late Hour

Myers's This Late Hour reminds us that as long as there is a bit of time to live, we can find some brightness. These poems hold tenderness rooted in sonic delight where softness is tempered by acknowledging the dark. There is vivid energy in the embodiment of red, a mustard scarf, a house in flames, a ladybug on a desk, the decline of gardens and the body, a love that "attends to the black undertow," and much more.

-Tara Betts, author of Refuse to Disappear

In this attentive, precise, and ultimately elegiac collection of verse, the poet's tone often resembles Philip Larkin's, with just as much bracing mordancy and colloquial ease. But whether caustic or soothing, Burt Myers's poems also have an attractive sense of tact-call it compassion. In their presence, as he says in one of his best, "we lean in close, / delighting in the delicacy."

-Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry (poetry) and Dailiness (prose)

"[M]arriage, and birth, / and death, and thoughts of these": such Larkinesque concerns are at the heart of Burt Myers's debut collection. Family ties of every sort-grandparents, parents, siblings, a wife-are commemorated in these deftly turned poems. Binding these ties with memorable speech, Myers becomes the still center, around which these human connections revolve. What's most touching is how much a part of him they are, a reminder of the extent to which we are all the sum of such connections, which is to say the sum of our ability to love.

-David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems