Some Perfect Year

Cameron Gearen's first full-length collection of poetry, Some Perfect Year, opens with a poem entitled 'Invitation,' and it's one we should heed. "Come with stones and a selectively green car. / I've set aside a weekend for crying and sleeping," the poem begins. Indeed, it would be a treat to spend a weekend or longer with this book. Crying might result as some of the subject matter is heavy, but Gearen leads us to a tentative redemption in the end: her final poem, called 'Aubade', mentions "the morning's promise," and foretells a more sanguine future. The book is knit together with epigraphs to those to whom Gearen owes a debt, including Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, and the British analyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott. Since Robert Pinsky picked her chapbook, Night, Relative to Day, for publication ten years ago, readers have been eagerly awaiting Gearen's first full-length collection. With its arresting imagery and its sonic surety, Some Perfect Year does not disappoint.