Almost two years in the making, The Lilac Years is Kevin J. O’Conner’s eleventh collection of poems. The book’s five sections explore the venerable themes of love and loss, the difficulties of living with isolation and depression, the little moments of life, the images and thoughts that art brings to the surface, and musings about poetry itself. The Lilac Years is a world of (among other things) trains, music, shadows, silence, memory, weather, trees, crows (dead and alive), ghosts, penguins at the Ueno Park Zoo, neon-marker hallucinations, Vasilina Orlova, Jean Cocteau, and Harvey Keitel.