I greatly admire Alison Deming's lucid and precise language, her
stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her
humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by
the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a
poetic use; but I am equally taken, I am more taken, by the wisdom
that lies behind the knowledge. I am amazed, and delighted, by her
authority and tenacity. She is of this world; she lives in it, and
for better or worse, it is the world she settles for; and she
understands that, even if she must rage a little, and sometimes
more than a little, she is one of its citizens. Like every original
poet, she appears to have sprung full-blown, out of Zeus' head I
want to say, but Aphrodite is here as well as Athena, the ocean as
well as the mountain. I congratulate her on this fine book., Gerald
Stern Alison Hawthorne Deming brings to her first collection of
verse the kinds of scrupulous observation and clear-eyed analysis
that characterize scientific inquiry as well as a poet's eye for
the telling moment.Science and Other Poems establishes astonishing
parallels between the mute, inexorable processes of the physical
universe and the dark mysteries of the human heart, parallels so
clearly wrought and convincing that we wonder why we had not
recognised them before. ""Caffe Trieste"" lays bare the unexamined
terror and sorrow that underlie the proliferation of faux fifties
kitsch, then strips the veil of spacious grace from the decade and
reveals it as it was for those who lived it: . . . bombs spread
like bacteria on culture plates, when the cost of a family staying
together might be Stelanize and high-voltage erasures. They're just
American, all shine and no pain. In the chilling ""Alliance,
Ohio,"" a mother and daughter suddenly find themselves stranded in
a world of predators, a poisonous world charged with sexual threat,
where every smile, every gesture, drips with sly menace. Yet
moments of dislocation can also be cause for rejoicing, as when a
speaker, after surprising a bat in the house, is moved to rapture
by the sight of the night sky. Every page of Science and Other
Poems is alive with startling juxtapositions, eerie parallels,
abrupt shifts of tone, and image after image of crystalline
perfection, as in this dazzling evocation of soft-shelled crabs:
""their finely stippled bodies that give to the touch, /
translucent as Japanese lanterns."" These poems imbue everything,
from the microscopic to the stellar, with wonder. Each instant of
illumination, like poetry itself, brings the world alive with ""a
faithfulness deeper than seeing.
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