Janet`s Cottage – Poems

D.H. Tracy’s debut volume, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize, marks a major event in contemporary poetry. Janet’s Cottage collects the richly textured, highly musical poems that have become Tracy’s hallmark in America’s finest literary journals, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Tracy brings buoyant wit and piercing intelligence to a range of poetic subjects, both intimate and domestic (“Janet’s Cottage”) and exotic and far-flung (“Impressions of the Tribeless”).      Whether he is riffing on a string of clichés, making worn-out phrases shine again, or spinning out a deft conceit that even John Donne himself would have admired, Tracy never fails to surprise and delight. What strikes the reader most about Tracy’s work is the sheer abundance of his imagination. The unique vision of the world that he conveys in poem after poem dazzles at first and is sure to stay with readers long after.