The poet Alice Notley died on May 17. But death was a place that she had visited before, a state with which she had long communed. Step into the uninvidious nonvoid inter alia especially be- Tween the live and dead for I have been there often and know it she writes in The Speak Angel Serie s, her penultimate collection, from 2020. Close readers of poetry are trained to uncouple the writer from the poem’s speaking “I,” and to treat lyric claims as fictive. But Notley often spoke of poetry as a conduit between the dead and the living. “Good poets open themselves to all the voices in the air,” she said in an interview from 2015, “and they are there, of the live and dead.” Should we take her at her word? I do. And I defy the skeptical reader to immerse themselves in her cosmogonic body of work and emerge without a crumb of faith. In God? Perhaps not. In an afterlife? Maybe. In Notley’s belief that poetry reaches to some kind of a beyond ? Yes, emphatically.…