Sea Gate is an extended meditation on the provisional, fleeting nature of the self. Elegiac and intensely musical, Jocelyn Emerson's poems draw on geology, cosmology, theology, and physics to render visible the complex relationship between spirit and the material world. These poems question our various definitions of permanence and, ultimately, they find solace in the life of the senses and in the ever-renewing possibilities of language itself.
from "Sea Gate":
Understand the troubling lexicon
of an intractable body,
its measured interdiction
joined to odds of sight
in this fluorescent verisimilitude
without mirror across the water
and crossing the water before me.
A particular skill to become the symmetry
of radium and wing (and not intervene)
learning the new motions of a multiple
and parabolic construction, the wild
hypotheses of the inner ear, the illness
and equilibrium of unseasonable whiteness-
that unseen provenance I cannot still-
"Attending to both John Clare and to Emmanuel Levinas, Sea Gate advances gracefully the project of recent American poets who have sought, through poetry, to know this world, this universe, its traces, and living engagements: And the stellar breeze of a misnamed / phenomenon can be seen well / in a nebula's cast-off shroud.' Reasserting a dialogue between truth and beauty, Jocelyn Emerson has given us renewed grandeur and consolation."-Bin Ramke
Jocelyn Emerson holds degrees from Smith College and the University of Iowa, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Writers' Workshop. She is the Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Boston University.