In his new book of poetry, Greater Ghost, Christian Collier offers moving glimpses into a dynamic world of Southern landscapes and brutal grief. “I am soaked in my losses,” the opening poem, “Boot Hill,” begins. The speaker asks, “what is time but a shaky way/ to try to measure what can never be had back?” The poems capture, one by one, losses of loved ones and strangers, both with intimate care. In one poem, “In His Place,” “wind drags its ghost” to the speaker of the poem, who looks up from watching the television. The wind, he writes, “[pulls] my face from the news of another Black man murdered.” He realizes a cousin, who was killed by a bullet, is trying to communicate with him. “I am on his mind,” he writes.

The wind acts as this kind of agent of attention in several poems. In “Monologue to an Oatmeal Moon,” the speaker of the poem is locked in “the unwonder of/ the current time that killed my friend.” The wind draws his awareness to the scene before him. The speaker says, “The wind dipped its hand into the back of the lake & stirred/ a spell I couldn’t look away from.” Like the elemental spirits in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Let Us Descend, Collier’s poems animate the natural world before him. The wind, the moon, the dove, the insect: they all become a part of his poetry. Sometimes they speak; sometimes the poetry is directed toward them. A mosquito becomes a character who provides a needed touch. “How strongly,” the line reads, “I’d been thirsting        for something breathing to taste me.” In “After the Bonfire,” the speaker says,

I heard the gulf mumble to itself.
The words from its salt-filled mouth, reverberating.
It said it was tired of amassing
the names of lifeless things:
dented cans of Bud,    Marlboros,      bodies.

I felt the same way. I never told you, but it was all there.

Like the gulf before him, the speaker writes that he himself is tired of being a tomb. “I’m a stone mausoleum at all times,” he says in “It Follows.” Grief and loss are not only experienced and observed by the speaker of the poems, but held within the poet’s physical frame, and the frame he offers the reader.

But Greater Ghost is not willing to let death have the last word, nor is the book willing to relinquish honesty. In the poem “When My Days Fill with Ghosts,” the speaker contends with the death of another person he knew, “how his low voice now exists only in memory.” Collier’s poetry acknowledges widespread Black death, but his poems are eulogies against erasure. In remembering his own with humility and honesty, he offers dignity and justice to the many lost, subtly restoring their presence and humanity and individuality. The work of these poems is integral to the health of our society and country—Collier is a critical American voice.

And the wounds and losses don’t stop: a bullet hits the heart of someone the speaker cares for (“it broke through all the fine china in his chest”), a girl is missing and the poet searches for her by a river, a friend is dead and illuminated only by the light of twenty-seven photos the narrator keeps of her on his computer. Poems scattered across the collection mourn a devastating miscarriage and its aftermath. In “Lamentation,” a poem with four quatrains and eight rotating lines, the speaker asks, in the face of such tragedy on earth, “How do we survive night, if not by faith the bone light will come?” Illuminating the edges of the painful losses is a sliver of hope. The speaker waits attentively for its arrival like an unseen dawning that will come from beyond himself and the painful world he can see. He references the gospel hymn, “Precious Lord,” that Mahalia Jackson sang at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. “Lead me on to the light,” the song goes.

Interestingly, the speaker is rarely drawn to respond to all this death with violence (he refuses to kill even a mosquito). He transmutes pain into prayer and unbounded pleasure: he reaches for God, for meaning, for alcohol and touch, for memory-making with kin. At certain points, Collier’s poetry reminded me of Dave Matthews’s rendition of the well-known line from Ecclesiastes: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”