D'Eux & Other Sorrows

D'eux & Other Sorrows, Laurie Byro's new volume of beautifully crafted poetry, reflects an enviable awareness of the nuances of grief, presented to the reader with the weight of fierce conviction.

The individual poems, intricately intertwined, delve unflinchingly into matters of loss, anger, disaffection and love, and are spoken in the voices of characters as disparate as Vincent Van Gogh, Cleopatra, Frida Kahlo, the River Seine, Isadora Duncan, and the distraught mother of Icarus, among others. Byro even gives the guilt-ridden Ted Hughes a long moment to mourn the death of his doomed daughter Shura, 'who makes her silent howl / while the moon fills / plump with its leaking mother's milk.'

Taken as a whole, this book can be seen as a tribute to the profundity of despair in its many guises--something not without its own dark beauty--as well as a moving acknowledgement of the wildness of the love that provokes it.