After Earth: Poems

by Michael Lavers

Part elegy, part ode, part pastoral, part sci-fi, After Earth looks back through history in order to consider history's end. Many of the poems are drawn from the concerns of a father for his children, from the impulse to record the Earth, to preserve what's slipping away, and to heal, if poems can, the bifurcation of nature and civilization. Reveling in the ornate as well as the plain, these poems cultivate astonishment not in the promise of another world, but in the here and now, turning "what is is wavering or tattered into permanence," and praising all they can, as Auden says we must, “for being and for happening.”

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published October 31, 2019

Reviews

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning collection that never seemed to falter, poem after poem. There is intelligence, humility, and soulfulness in each poem, born of deep struggles with life. Highly recommended.

[Kjersten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lavers' poetry is thoughtful and immensely beautiful. His mosaic language is layered with vivid, organic imagery, which leaves brilliant impressions of science fiction and existentialism. Taken on rapturous, multi-leveled journeys of humanity and earthly observation, his poetry leaves a reader quite dazzled and breathless.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"They cried out hoping/ someone heard, they spoke in darkness,/ but the darkness grew. The called it life,/ but we don't know what it was for." Michael Lavers creates captivating mini-mythologies in this finely crafted collection.

[Truman Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems from this collection are simply beautiful. Michael’s work in After Earth doesn’t conform to modern convention—rather, his poems seems to unfold in language and style that feels natural and familiar, as if it’s been with (and part of) us all along, yet never captured on paper until now.

Too difficult to pick just one favorite, but below are the titles of some of my top selections.

Instead of a Lullaby
Andromache’s Lullaby
Coda
The Task
Will Exult over You with Loud Singing
Patmos Revisited
Invective against Stars
The Rustle of Hemlock
That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die


Favorite passage:
(only selected this one because it’s a beautiful sonnet and short enough to fit here)

Coda

From the garden rose the sound of bees
that lurched and wobbled through the peonies.
We ate eggs and toast with milk that warmed
in minutes in the sun while fat drones swarmed
and looped like bullets misfired from the fields.
It was the sound the mind makes when it yields
to glutted blood. I didn’t understand,
until one smelled the syrup on your hand,
and in a gold-encrusted drunken strut,
smeared pollen from its mandibles and gut
along your wrist. That morning you had tied
your hair, and as you rose and ran inside,
it gently bounced, and loosed, and then unfurled.
If the next is better, I’ll still miss this world.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely and tender poems full of wonderful imagery and observation. The poetic voice expresses a longing and love for the simple beauties of our present world while also interrogating old world philosophies and exploring possible future worlds. This is one I'll return to many times.

[Maren Loveland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luminous and filled to the brim with love. Thank you💛