An apocalyptic, incendiary, autumnal energy floats over Robert Schultz’s new book of poems, Into the New World. In Schultz’s book, the terrorist demolition of the Twin Towers, the warming planet, and a poem nodding to the more recent alt-right terror in Charlottesville are the terrible ‘disclosings’ that signal an imminent endgame that sometimes leaves the narrator lying loose from God. But we also encounter curtainis lifting in the bedrooms of lovers excruciatingly aware of imperilment but also exquisitely attuned to the erotic love of late middle age. Formal, risk-taking, inventive, this is very much a book for our charged and dangerous moment.

When Keats wrote about the world as a vale of Soul-making, he was thinking about the work being done in poems like these. The soul here pushes back continually against a violence from without, imaged here as either war or winter. And what warms the soul, and delivers it from the inevitable human failures of feeling, is the fire of married love, the continual invitation to walk through the fallen world with another soul, hand in hand.

With exact craft and earned insight, Robert Schultz’s Into the New World gives us renewed hope in this uncertain age. The poems are testimonies of life’s many chemistries, from the intimate to the historic, and language’s alchemy.