COLD MOONS

Magnus Sigurdsson spare poems pay rare attention to the minute revelations of nature rather than allowing the crudeness of machinery to bulldoze our sentiments. Through intricate wordplay and a titanic understanding of his native Icelandic, rendered with perfect tone by award-winning translator Meg Matich, Sigurdsson creates tiny but arresting artifacts--fragments that scale an instant to an aeon, and a thousand millennia to a second. Whether describing the dwarf wasp's one-millimeter wingspan or the roots of a bonsai, he is a cosmologist of language, and Cold Moons is an intimate map of his distinctive universe.