Customer Reviews

Five Terraces

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Art is at work throughout Ann Fisher-Wirth's second full-length book. The collection is brilliantly framed by the two halves of "Walking Wu Wei's Scroll," a long poem about a work of art dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Fisher-Wirth steps into the scroll and leads us on an imaginative journey across its terrain. Thus we move into the twin worlds of Art and the Past. The second of seven sections contains "The Trinket Poems," fearless and fascinating poems about a little-known Tennessee Williams' play, "The Mutilated," in which Fisher-Wirth played the role of Trinket. In the poems, she mixes her character's life with her own as daughter, wife, mother, teacher, actor. By putting the spotlight on the various roles she plays, both on- and offstage, she sketches in the intersection between art and life and suggests that we are destined to replay the past again and again. This latter theme is further developed in poems about a father's death, a mother's death, and even a dying cat. A number of poems take a close look at marriage. In these, the speaker enjoys the security and comfort that come to the long married but regrets and longs for the lost passion and exhilaration of earlier days. Among the most poignant of these poems about loss are those about the speaker's first child, a daughter, who died at birth. Even years later and with other children, the speaker grieves for that child, a grief her other children inherit. In "Moth" the speaker recalls reading at night to her children:

. . . and their sweet

bodies and hair grew sticky with summer as they

sprawled all over me, there was a moth

at the window, a soft moon-splotched moth battering at the window

and that moth could never get in

no matter how they opened

and opened-

Fisher-Wirth's grip on craft is flawless and evident in many ways, most interestingly in the artistic arrangement of her poems on the page. She gives us poems that butt up to the left margin, prose poems that take up the whole page, and poems that dance across the page. And she gives us a number of multi-part poems that in their divisions suggest a speaker seeking to know how the pieces of her life fit together to form a coherent whole. We cannot help but admire Fisher-Wirth's attempt to make something beautiful out of her life and ours, an attempt that beautifully succeeds.

Fisher-Wirth gives us beautifully crafted confessional poetry. She exquisitely presents the pain she has lived, wrestled with and largely surmounted.