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Noelle Kocot’s poems are like sunlight coming through a window Indeed, one of Kocot’s primary concerns throughout God’s Green Earth, the New York poet’s eighth full-length collection, is light, and the stillness of living required to observe it We are summoned to ‘look at this kitchen / In its bright survival’ (‘Kitchen’) The light of morning is anthropomorphised as ‘indifferent’, while the entire month of October is ‘pearl-bright’ (‘Poem for —’) A recurring trope throughout the collection is empty domestic space, and light’s inflection on it The image feels apt at a time when we are stuck in our homes, bereft of the habitual punctuation of our days ‘Don’t know how to get back to the other age fluttering / Behind us’, Kocot writes in ‘Transitions’, seeming to speak directly to the not-so distant past ‘Trying to understand, trying to relate, / I fail miserably in the dissembling moment’: I feel the resonance of that ‘dissembling moment’ now, as the day ‘taunts me / With its promise’ (‘Retreat’) at its beginning, and unspools by mid-afternoon   Despite the focus on interior domestic space, these aren’t stagnant or static poems ‘To hobble out of a singular verb, that is called life!’ Kocot tells us in ‘Narcissism’, the spondees leaping along with an oddly apposite glee, creating a feeling of bruised hope This is a typical example of Kocot’s neat and spare poetic line I’m reminded of Baldwin’s adage about wanting to write ‘sentences as clean as bone’, but rather than being picked clean, Kocot’s lines feel sun-bleached from being left out in the open At times they come out as purple as the twilight they describe:   If I could taste the insistences Of dusk, I would rise from the shocked Grass and imagine a shelter of miniature Tides   (‘Paying Attention’)   Throughout the collection, Kocot writes with a soft-spoken clarity, creating a feeling of calmness and reassurance Tonally, it recalls the work of Wendell Berry Compare, for instance, Berry’s ‘The Peace