Overlook

Years in the making, Stephen Sandy’s Overlook gathers themes and occasions that have intrigued the poet throughout his career. This powerful collection explores love and death, success and failure, war and disaster, with appropriate measures of wit and grief. Meditations on life as a game to be completed rather than won juxtapose scenes of individuals confronting the challenges that occur in any life. Sandy balances these texts with poems elegiac in tone, written for friends and family, as in lyrics for his father, and in the masterly “As Smoke Robes Fire.” Poems about art and artists, ranging from Nicolas Poussin and John Constable to Francis Bacon and Philip Guston, round out the collection. Profound and rewarding, Overlook showcases the gifts of a master poet at the height of his powers.