In The Yellow Book, the home-seeking traveler—”a decadent who lived to tell the story”—finds lodgings in our fierce fin de siècle under the roof of his Dublin attic flat. Amid echoes from dead writers, “clouds of unknowing” from his “last Camel,” and ghosts from his own life, the poet muses wisely and wittily on our wound-down decade and expiring double millennium. These twenty-one absorbing, sometimes mordantly funny, and always delightful meditations offer us both the distinctive details of our shared lives and a theoptic view from “windows flung wide on briny balconies/above an ocean of roofs and lighthouse beams;/like a storm lantern the wintry planet swings.” (“Night Thought”)
