a.m.

a.m. achieves something quite remarkable: a calm that is a sublimated urgency, a meditation on distance that opens into a habitat for human intimacy: `the emptiness that forms before love comes’. Distance here is a prerequisite for relation, and this writing is in relentless and passionate pursuit, courting `you’ for its extended family, placating `all of these things with their gaping beaks / of light and shape and weight, all asking / not to be left out’. One of the many joys of this artful construction is that it is a public building, at pains to resist `an outmoded binary opposition between luxury and necessity’. Mandelstam claimed `To read Pasternak’s poetry is to clear your throat, to fortify your breathing, to fill your lungs; surely such poetry could provide a cure for tuberculosis’. In a.m., Ayres has set his sights on the common cold.