Gary Grossman’s Lyrical Years navigates memories in five parts allowing for the progression of thirty years to pass for both the poet and subsequent verse. The memoir quality blends the narrator and poet and the voice merges as memory and teaching what it means to learn to live. There are three sections devoted to the arc of time and life: “Novicehood,” “Learning the Ropes,” and “Maturity is an Aging Wine.” These sections explore the aging process and how life changes over the course of years within the self and family. There are also two interludes named “A Walk Outside” and “A Second Walk.” In these, the reader is invited to explore the outdoors with Grossman’s fine detail.

Each section is a love song, but together, Lyrical Years becomes a love symphony written for life and experience itself. These love songs are for brief lives that enter and leave the world in a flash and for the narrator’s children and wife that he shares intimate bonds with. Grossman transports us with casual, verse. Questions are left with what comes next for an aging poet and a scientist that has stopped being a scientist or rather cannot stop being a scientist even when leaving the field. The poems show a maturing of personhood and at the same time allow for the reader to wonder at the “what next” of their own lives as well as the poet’s.

Lyrical Years is a fine collection and begs for the sequel that explains what happens next.