"Garren's poems evidence
profound sensitivity to a world that many don't see, or
from which they avert their eyes, and at her best, she offers
powerful empathy and an arresting rendering of humanity's
relation to nature." — Boston Review
The Piercing celebrates the here and now while endorsing
a deep faith in the necessity of the imagination. In response
to life in a literal world, Christine Garren's lyric poems
ignite belief in exhilaration. Ordinary settings—a park, a
pond, a littered vacant lot, an attic room—through Garren's
eyes reveal something extraordinary. For example, in "February
Snow," the poet surveys a winter scene through the windows
of various rooms and reflects how "Sometimes it is beautiful,
in some of the minutes / then ordinary again— / . . . that
feeling / of air in the midst of burial." In "The Well," she
writes of reaching an impasse in a relationship: "The exhilarating
life is finished. We must accept it / this late afternoon
and move / back into the rational world." Spare, quiet, visual
distillations of the physical and emotional dimensions of
the moment define The Piercing with a driving energy
at once delicate and fierce.
Small piercing as if in the earlobe
your leaving caused. Air is filling it now, time fills it,
the view through these windows fills the tiny hole.
The people on the street, the manic father,
the other father carrying his child in pink—this
millimeter's width opening is for a decade to fit through.
Look, there you go. There I go—there our landscape goes as
if
through a fantastical roof's hole, the shingle pulled off,
the nail off—
our death is
flying over the city.
—"The Piercing"
Christine Garren is the author of the poetry collections
Afterworld and Among the Monarchs. A Los Angeles
Times Book Award finalist and a NEA Fellowship recipient,
she was born in Philadelphia and has lived in Greensboro,
North Carolina, since 1979. |
