A Year in the New Life

Some poems in A Year in the New Life, a slim, 56-page sophomore collection by Jack Underwood, begin with lines from other poets, positioned not as distinct epigraphs but rather bleeding into the poems themselves, which seems very fitting for a work in which a stable sense of self feels increasingly elusive. In the poem “Errata” the lyric speaker starts by talking about their dying grandfather but later undercuts their own authority: “I’m sure I’ve not remembered […] correctly, maybe / someone else’s grandfather.” In Underwood’s rendering, individual grief becomes communal, and the unreliable memory and anxiety of error that in recent years have come to define our realities demand that we share our feelings of joy, fear, and sadness.

A Year in the New Life reads mostly as a fresh and tender book, as if the printer ink is still a little wet, the paper a little wounded, the book still setting into our contemporary elegiac moment. Many poems are conversational and self-deprecating, and describe an inner life consumed by quiet riots, while broader disasters beckon outside. The question of care keeps coming up: how can we receive and dole out care when the tired and hesitant self is pitted against not only the world but also against one’s various roles as, in Underwood’s case, a father, a man, and a poet in the now?

To live differently, to defy society’s pressures to always be productive, may be the mantra for this collection. One poem is titled “Where to start, how to stop?” To stop, for Underwood, might be a kind of un-living, a soft and new language, a recalibration, where the rain washes “everything that seemed in need of washing” or the lava becomes “oblivious to events upon its surface.” While it might be “easier to die and die / and keep on dying” these poems offer glimpses of “returning more determined to love […] To think, tomorrow could be another life.”