Amazon.com Review
Meredith Carson joins the esteemed ranks of writers such as Mary Oliver (House of Light, New and Selected Poems) and Pattiann Rogers (Eating Bread and Honey, Firekeeper) in her poignant depiction of the minutest of life forms in the world around us. The poem is her microscope into rare regions, as shown in these lines from "These Plankton, Jellyfish, Winged Sea Snails, and Pelagic Worms": "They pulse, roll with a glitter / of phosphorescent cilia, / coil softly and oar their way towards fate."
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Library Journal
With this volume, Ohio University Press launches its biannual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize series, which will feature hitherto unpublished writers or manuscripts. The success of Carson, 83 at the time of this publication, ought to remind readers of the flurry of publicity that surrounded the appearance of Virginia Adair's Ants on the Melon (LJ 4/1/96). Now, as then, it is difficult not to respond to the phenomenon of the older yet fledgling poet as much as to the poetry itself. Carson's poetry is what one might expect to receive tucked into letters from one's intelligent and sober-sided great-aunt; a scientist by training and a longtime resident of Honolulu, she never permits her imagination to lead her out of the bounds of accuracy and reality: as she says in "Dusting Books," "My own watch ticks with modern certainty." As a result, her poems are informative and accessible, yet she has deprived herself of the wildness and strangeness of poetry itself. For larger collections only.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
