Trajectories

As if Mel Brooks and John Donne had given birth to an unlikely love child in the 1930s, here comes Sam Eisenstein – the octogenarian debut poet from Pasadena, California. Eisenstein is both funny and achingly sad, writing of the woes of marriage, parenthood and ‘the bad business of growing old’. Here is a poet who has spent decades analysing the world from his acerbic, humanist perspective. Eisenstein’s book sears with its cosmic and comic vision of how Americans live – and die – in this time of terror and desire.