As I read Eileen Cleary's 2 a.m. with Keats, I felt breathless, suspended in a place of red keys, plum stones, cats, willows, and sphinxes. It would minimize the reach of this brilliant collection to call it an elegy or a eulogy, or even a love story to Lucie Brock-Broido or John Keats, though it is all of those things. Here, in this place where "the elm says Grief and the oak, Grief," the poems shine and scatter across the pages like "a phantom of stars." Cleary engages the rhythms of another world, of "sweet music honeyed and unheard," where "Lucie reaches forty years back..."

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