|
“Divine Attention will be cherished by poetry connoisseurs, but it also should be read by those who think they don’t like poetry. Riveting, urgent, uncompromising — this is a book to change their minds.”—Alice Fulton Paulette Roeske’s is a striking new voice in poetry, and Divine Attention proclaims the unwavering originality of her talent. With rapt attention, Roeske chronicles the hard-edged realities of a familiar world and reveals another world (of art, of mystery) that transcends objective experience. Roeske is acutely perceptive of nonverbal indicators of thought, feeling, and being. Indeed, in the evocative poem, “Deep Sex,” which employs the sky as a metaphor, she implies benediction in the limitations of words: you feel it as a failure of language
as absence, deep space
that offers the eye no place to stop The theme of surpassing the verbal, the tangible, is reinforced in the arrangement of the collection. The opening section explores the physical and psychic shocks we endure as mortals bound to this earth, but as we read, the attention gradually shifts to a search for an antidote to loss, first through the solace of family, history, and the long dead, and finally through willed acts of the imagination. Crafted with a transparency of style that approaches poetic purity, Divine Attention bespeaks above all a poet who attends reality with reverence.
Paulette Roeske’s first collection of poems is titled Breathing Under Water. She currently lives in Evansville, Indiana.
|
