Adam Kirsch   Invasions.
Ivan R. Dee, 80 pages, $15.95

With his first book of poems, A Thousand Wells (2002), Adam Kirsch announced his arrival as a poet to be watched, and for this achievement he was awarded The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Now, from the perspective of Invasions, that earlier collection, however impressive itself, becomes a foreshadowing of more important things to come. As James Wood, one of our best critics, has commented on Invasions, “Adam Kirsch is the most exciting, the most serious, and the most courageous young poet-critic in America.” Indeed young. Mr. Kirsch is in his thirties, and he is clearly launched on a major career.

Kirsch is the book critic of The New York Sun, and previously was the assistant literary editor for The New Republic. He has also reviewed for The New Yorker (where I read his remarkable essay on Wordsworth), for The Times Literary Supplement, and for other magazines. His book The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets(Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath) appeared in 2005, exploring how personal pain and confession became transformed into poetry, the “wounded surgeon” an allusion to Eliot’s Jesus in his lines “The Wounded Surgeon plies the steel/ That questions the distempered part;/ Beneath the bleeding hands we feel/ The sharp compassion of the healer’s art/ Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.” The surgeon for the six poets