Poetry

“Fetch” is an old word for a double. It’s that secret self, often scarcely known to us, we dispatch on errands we’re too timid to undertake on our own. We stay home, listening to the rain beat against the windowpanes, but our fetch is on the prowl, stepping boldly into shady dives and shadier adventures. In her third collection of poems, the American poet Tamar Yoseloff, long a resident of London, uses the notion of the fetch to give structure and resonance to a sequence of strong but delicate lyrics. “Fetch” (Salt, 62pages, $14.95) strikes me as one of the best collections to have appeared in 2007. The book, with woodblock illustrations by the artist Linda Karshan, is elegantly designed too. (Though Salt is an English publisher, its books are distributed in America.)