Making Bones Walk

Winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of new poems for 2007, Alex Boyd gives us back the world, as if remade by thoughtful, inventive and always engaged language, in this excellent debut collection. Boyd’s concerns are strikingly mature for a young poet–to examine closely, to record faithfully, and to speak out in memorable lines with style and clarity. The concern and care he shows, for both the formal richness of English poetry, and histories both sensual and political, is exemplary. He gives us lessons, about power, pain, hard light, and possible grace. Time and again, poems here had me stopping, returning, moved by the possibility that he might just be one of the best new poets of his emergent generation.