The First Echo meditates on the comings and goings of midlife-births and deaths, losses and gains, despairs and hopes. In poems that range from rigorous formalism to breathless free verse, Shane Seely reaches for instruction, understanding, and comfort. He finds solace in works of art-including paintings, literature, and film-as well as in nature, human relationships, and memory. He suggests that, like the bat or the whale, we humans understand ourselves through echo, through the sounds we send out and the sounds that come back. That returning voice, like our own and yet not quite ours, reminds us that to be alone is to be with a self that is at once strange and familiar. Evocative and engaging, The First Echo offers poems on memory, illness, and grief-reflecting on the sadness and knowledge attached to each.

Shane Seely is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Surface of the Lit World and The Snowbound House. He is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing.