Beginning to End

Sensing the end as the living dead do, Luke Roberts gives us testimony of what the Empire has done to itself, and to all of us “held together in contempt,” as we become “the shape we’re avoiding / in low-level continuous / grief.” This is poignant, powerful poetry for today.

In this sharp, unflinching collection, Beginning to End generously offers us a “loving rewrite of the ending” with profound emotional and intellectual force. Luke Roberts is a brilliant poet and writes at the edge, where language fractures under the pressure of grief, history, and survival—yet continues, urgently, to sing. These poems are at once turbulent and incandescent, dodging easy meaning while landing moments of startling clarity and depth. Less about getting somewhere than staying in motion, the book loops, falters, and restarts. It knows we’re all living in the unfinished—always beginning, always ending—and makes something electric out of that. It’s extraordinary. I love it.

Beginning to End is an acoustic book, written as if alone and awake at night, purled together through memory and meditation. There is a quietly pained quality to its thinking, as if the very condition of lyric language were torn between its dual offerings of solace and clarity. And yet, such wending of reflection and observation through loss attests to the intricacy of a simple language, the poet’s feeling for nature, and that admirable ability to ever close the gap between the life we need and the life we want.