Written in a voice both direct and timely, After Homer speaks to our historical moment in a way that connects with a larger sense of our time passing. At times personal, at times political, the poems remain anchored in a formal complexity that delivers clarity and nuance to the ideas set forth within them.Whether writing about the sinking of the Lusitania, the death of Chekhov, his father's passing, or the death of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, Filkins reminds us that, no matter the loss, "poetry will survive, " helped by the studied meditation he brings to it.

Meanwhile, at the beginning and end of the book, lyric renditions of brief passages of the Iliad underscore Homer's notion that there is "nothing sadder than man" is as true today as it was for the Greeks.