Customer Reviews

Deep Light: New and Selected Poems, 1987--2007

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Deep Light is a collection to own, to cherish, and to return to again and again. Rebecca McClanahan's word use is haunting - who else would call lungs `those meaty wings' - a phrase with all the power of startling freshness that simultaneously reminds us of our fleshly, frail, selves. And who but she could refer to making `anniversary love' - a coupling of words that conjures up occasions when love-making was celebratory and also, somehow, expected as part of the occasion?

Rebecca McClanahan's particular, gifts, for me, reach out from those two phrases. No one can evoke a sense of time and place as well as she does, with that added sense of time past and time present sliding over each other, like panes of glass, such that we see from level to level even as we're fixed in the present. Differing levels of time, or of reality, are handled with such deftness of touch that it's especially hard to write about them in a review without somehow doing violence to them. The sureness of tone in `To the Absent Wife of the Beautiful Poet at the Writer's Conference' is both humorous and evocative; its opening line a triumph of honesty and regret "I want you to know that nothing happened'. And that's the beauty of real poetry. The words take us beyond where words can normally reach.

Rebecca also has a great website with extracts of her poems and an audio of Garrison Keillor reading some of them. Check it out. But buy, and treasure, this collection.

Allan Hunter
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