The View We're Granted

This graceful, skilled poet writes especially moving poems.

Peter Filkins's beautifully articulated, reticulated poems are filled with questions, and the questions they're filled with are the unanswerable ones. Their distinction and power lie in their ability to make us ask those questions, too, as if for the first time.

As one who hailed Peter Filkins’s stunning first book, I am happy to say that its great promise has been realized with The View We’re Granted.

Peter Filkins manages to use form to lure the colloquial toward song, as well as to invest moments of song with an awareness of the perils and possibilities of our everyday world. It's a tension that is revelatory, and one that claims, at the end, the power of poetry to survive, and to help us.

A deeply moving collection. Filkins traces out the rhythms of loss and renewal, of childhood and adulthood, in a blank verse so skillfully worked it seems effortless. Very few poets today write with such power and assurance.