Blending the personal and the political, the poems in Hindsight search for forms of the sacred in a time of torment. Some contemplate the shocks of COVID-19, others confront a politically torn nation. Each poem asks some version of the question, “What can be made of all this / grief.” Beneath theology pulses the private life. Warren investigates a personal past to weigh the moral meaning of experience. In “Hindsight,” the speaker discovers, “I could have / seen you better, I / know that now.” Whom have we hurt? What does it mean to be conscious? from “Such Times” There were laws to be smashed, a country intent on doing just that. We lived in such times. Still, in Prokofiev’s piano sonata, the notes kept rising like a vine on a trellis. And that, too, was true. There was a way in which it was true. But did we hear?
