Celia Drill’s The Lost World is some of the best contemporary poetry I have ever read. Her work is enthralling; she plays with language, creating images in the mind that are a kaleidoscope of emotion and thought. I found myself highlighting entire poems instead of single lines. I read her poems two, three times over, looking for meaning withing the meaning. Drill creates surreal landscapes of sound—I read her poems out loud, wanting to feel the flow of her language.

Drill’s poem “The Raven” describes the raven thus: “When the raven appears, he is never a bird; he is always a small, dark man. He walks with a cane, with God as his witness.”

A bird dies alone in the snow: “I take her home to forest’s solace, lay her in the dark earth beneath joined pines […] The forest is mourners holding hands. My dead bird recedes into roots. And unlike me, silent stranger in dimming woods, she sings from networked branches.”

Celia Drill crafts lines of such beauty: “Rain makes widows of the ghost pines…”; “There is no time, say the dragonflies, only color.”; “Sweetness spirals from the throats of violet, coalesces, sisterhoods of stars.” Her poem “Mug for Lapsang Souchong” is as graceful as the fox that the potter dreams of.

We know writers are artists, and in The Lost World Celia Drill embodies this ideal. “I am only a sparrow,” she says, “but I am voluminous.”