The Moon on Elba

The title of Andrew Frisardi's The Moon on Elba comes from one of its poems, a beautiful ghazal, striking in its graceful blend of form and intelligent feeling. The book's opening poems include the Audenesque meditation "Word" and a character poem, "The Jeweler," in which marvels are found, ironically, in the mundane. Frisardi writes of bedtime when we "undress-rehearse for death." He offers a Covid poem in Sapphics and a lovely ballade for "That singing contradiction," the late Timothy Murphy.