"When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought..."

Richard Sinay has built this collection as a single long arc, and the arc is where its power lives. He opens with Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, which turns on one hinge: twelve lines of loss, then a couplet of restoration. He then organizes the whole book around that turn. Part I, "The Joy of Love," and Part II, "The Sadness of Loss," are two halves of one coin, as he says in the introduction. What makes it work is the span of time. The poems run from a teenager's 1969 notebook through to a husband writing to his wife in 2024, and a reader can watch a heart change across decades.

The most affecting pieces are the plainest. "Learning to Love" lets a man who was never told "Good night" as a boy end with his own children asleep, hugged and told "I love you." "Old Dishes" puts a cracked plate on a separate shelf and lets it carry a marriage's quiet erosion without comment. The later Tina poems, from "To Tina, Miss Sunshine" to "My Sunshine Girl," are tender and unguarded about illness and fear: "I fear the thought of losing you." Then the book turns hard. "Cause of Death: Broken Heart" imagines doctors searching a healthy man's body and finding nothing, and "Happy Father's Day" closes the book with an estranged father's raw ache. That ending hits harder for being unpolished.

This is a book for readers who keep drawers of old letters, who love across a long life, and who know that grief and gratitude live in the same house. It earns its Booky for emotional honesty and the courage to leave it unvarnished.