Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare

Ms. Haskins has the wide-eyed power to be tender, vulnerable, and exact. She noses through her amazing world like a baby tortoise, feeling her contours with delicate feet and finding everything weird, and still marvelous.

Insightful and beautifully written, Lola Haskins' poetry is as beguiling as the Florida creeks, tupelo trees, and wading birds that grace its pages. Trusting equally in pen and paddle, Haskins perfectly invokes the blink of rain on a lake's surface, the moment when a river's color shifts from clear to amber. In Lola Haskins, water has its own Poet Laureate.

Haskins’ work here is spare, honed to a sharp and flinty precision. She travels deep into Clare’s mind and spirit to reveal profound and deeply moving illuminations about his—and her own—spiritual core.

Anchored by Clare’s text, the poems in Asylum range widely— geographically, emotionally, and technically—and this large-hearted flexibility and suppleness is one of the book’s many gifts.