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Described by its publisher as a ‘generous selection’, Peter Gizzi’s Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2019) is more of a waterfall or a plenitudal montage of thirty years of work, probably equivalent to four full collections glued together (though in fact it draws from seven collections, from 1992 to the present) The poems are continually arresting and expansive, containing Whitmanian multitudes The result is enjoyably overwhelming, and makes Sky Burial a difficult book to review There is so much interesting foam flying off these poems, that read like light glinting off stacked objects in an opened storage unit stuffed to the brim with salvage from the car boot of American poetry, or like Emily Dickinson listening to bees; ‘Like trains of cars on tracks of plush’   Each collection and poem carries differences in preoccupations and in times: times of writing, of referents that carry their own times, and in the different ‘I’s-as-self-prophesying manifestations that Gizzi conjures His poetic avatar, over the collection, is an unstable textural spectre/s arising across decades I am interested in how parts of collections are recycled outside of their original contexts in volumes of ‘Selected Poems’, and in this instance Gizzi has decided not to delineate the start of separate collections within Sky Burial outside of the table of contents This, I think, suits the atemporal present found in these often-lyric poems: the weird flattening effect of a ‘Selected Poems’ is that they can all seem to have been written just now, if you don’t poke at them too much They participate in a kind of flexible repristination Adjacently, Gizzi’s ongoing project involves exploring the self as constituted and re-constituted by language and writing poetry, as well as poetic text as a continuing participatory material in the world The velocity of ‘Selected Poems’ as a concept is like Gizzi’s own poetic velocity: both are hopeful projects – to make things always new, recasting fragments or even prior poems, lyric conventions, or prior poetic selves This is the hopeful project of being a poet, and the attendant responsibilities of poetry as a vocation, not only as