“An immense precision is necessary,” announces Edward Carson in Bird Flock Fish School , a collection of poetry that sees language as an example of “emergence,” the spontaneous interaction of behaviours by which birds flock and fish travel in schools. These shimmering poems–which attempt to surprise the reader out of familiar ways of understanding nature, mortality, loss and love–articulate a vast, roving philosophical curiosity channelled through urgent form. Using a voice both sophisticated and simple, forged in unadorned couplets tuned to near-hallucinatory clarity, Carson’s poems invent a new way of perceiving, a world where “everything unites, at odds with itself.”