Where do you start with an edition of collected poems? At the end of a poet’s career? At the beginning? Do you dive in randomly and hope for the charms of stichomancy? Wherever the reader treads in Jeet Thayil’s gorgeously produced Collected Poems (Aleph), there’s an air of “collective hallucination” as we’re led through multifarious lives and cityscapes via sonnets, sestinas and saints. Thayil calls himself a “poet of small buildings.” He entreats us to raise our arms “in praise of love’s racing anapaests.” But he’s also the kind of poet who tells you about the old punctures on his arms, how grief rises, wearing...
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