Freezing

Steve Langan’s brilliant first book is full of passion suffused with irony, poems cagily built to deconstruct sentimentality by using self-consciousness as a kind of comic foil. But for all the poet’s clever feints and evasions, at the core of the work beats the heart of a romantic. Langan’s methods are luminously impressionistic, and the poems percolate with image and materiality, inflection and the full-throated music of language. Freezing glitters with the distant light (or explosions of...