Borrowed Light

If you use the social media platform X, you will likely know Peter Vertacnik from his thoughtfully curated Forgotten Good Poems, a beacon of civilisation in the three-ring circus that Elon Musk’s Twitter has become. Vertacnik is now the winner of the New Criterion Prize, given to a ‘manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form’. If you are keen on formalist poetry – and really, who wouldn’t be? – then you will be entranced by The Nature of Things Fragile, Vertacnik’s debut collection, which showcases many traditional poetic forms (sonnet, sestina, villanelle, epigram, double triolet, and so on) as well as a wide variety of newly invented forms. Though he is an adroit formalist, Vertacnik also writes poems of freer structures and rhymeless patterns, giving a satisfying variety to the book while masking some of the intentionality of craft. Nevertheless, the collection’s formalism is its prevailing effect, and the delicate beauty and intricate structures of the poems invite comparisons to Richard Wilbur and Anthony Thwaite.

As one might gather from his title, Vertacnik immerses the reader in the fragility of living things, and not unexpectedly the collection is dominated by elegiac tones. Some poems are threnodies on the deaths or declining illnesses of loved ones, while others are laments on a past that cannot be recovered, often in subtle but sure-footed iambics: an old photo of his parents, with wrinkles airbrushed, ‘designed to free / this likeness from time’s price’; candles, guttering, ‘reminding us how shadows shift’; the poet’s mirrored reflection, ‘holding ...