Customer Reviews

Micrographia

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Don't forget to read the author's other book...The Keep. It's a great one as well. She seems like someone who would appreciate a handmade mahogany jewelry box...with an inlay that may be a little crooked!

Emily Wilson, Micrographia (University of Iowa Press, 2009)

In 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia, or, Some Physical Descriptions of Minute Bodes Made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. It was a revolutionary scientific text, one of the very first to describe the microscopic world. (Completely unrelated, it was also the first publication of the Royal Society, who have for centuries been Britain's premier publishers of scientific literature.) Emily Wilson didn't take up the science in her book Micrographia, but she obviously likes the idea of looking at things very closely. Each of the short poems in this sort volume hones in on something, examines it as closely as possible:

"it has not yet occurred upon the limb it has not determined to be spurlike
it is not yet done it lingers in the pattern of its advancement

are you long of this world I
am delivered into casting my bit among us

are you a being of more than one measure
ruffed so none can hold"
("Coal Age")

As well, Wilson has also internalized the patterns of microscopic life, using repetition in language the way organisms build with clusters of similar cells, and to much the same purpose. Emily Wilson's poetry is an organic thing, and a fine one. Paradoxically, my one problem with the collection is that I wanted more of it, though I know that such would probably destroy the balance. *** ½