Songs for a son

the long version

"The death of a young child, the painful continuance of life in the shadow of that loss, the fear of forgetting, the reassertion of life in the bereaved--this is surely on of the hardest themes to write well about. Robert Peters has managed to do so, creating from the burden of loss a sequence of poems whose language, abjuring easy emotionalism, attains a cold, earthbitter, refreshing transparency like spring-water. Staying always close to the concrete and local ("No ideas but in things") he achieves the universal--a death tells us anew something we need to grasp concerning the human condition." --From the jacket of first edition of Songs for a Son--