Bluff
is a return to offer farewells - to father, homeland, childhood. A haunting elegy crafted out of the tangible world, these poems approach the precipice and turn the reader back towards life with the senses alight. Chiles is a lyric poet of subtle, mysterious gifts.
-Dan O'Brien
"We were nearing the end of something / though it was morning, the day young," so begins Adam Chiles' clear-eyed elegy for his dying father. His grieving involves a return to his native Yorkshire: cottages on eroding bluffs, dark shore, stiff winds, rain against glass, and the ever-present sea. There's a remarkable sense of inevitability to the forces he conjures. These lyrics sing to us of loss and change and continuity. They sting and soothe, sometimes all at once, as when Chiles reads Edward Thomas aloud to his father, "all afternoon, I give back / willow herb and grass" or when he sits in his father's art studio, taking consolation in "his oils, his resins."
- Catherine Staples