Prodigal

August 17, 2015
For over four decades, Gregerson (The Selvage) has with compassion and intellect composed poems that wend through mythology, science, family narratives, and current events. Yet this volume is notable more for cohesion than change. Gregerson’s signature stepped lines call to mind the tercets of later W.C. Williams, but they are unmistakably her own. Uneven line lengths are steadied by immaculate prosody and consistent stanza structures; frequent pivots from line to line mete out progressions in thought as the poems travel down and across the page. Gregerson could be writing of her own lyric sensibility when she describes Athena and Arachne, who “with their earth-bread, grass-/ fed, kettle-dyed// wools, devised on their looms/ transitions so subtle no/ hand could trace nor eye discern/ their increments// yet the stories they told were perfectly clear.” A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy. Reading her work collected in this fashion, it becomes clear that a salient element of her poetics is the enduring commitment to thinking through suffering in its myriad forms and sources. Gregerson’s poems remind the reader “not unkindly, See,/ the world you have to live in is// the world that you have made.”

September 1, 2015
The breadth of poetic creativity in National Book Award finalist Gregerson's grand compilation is beautiful in scope, elastic in space, and spectacularly aware and erudite. As she considers Roman gods, the limits of Earth, art, and politics, her use of delicate detail and experimental forms create a vibrant tapestry, while more ethereal subjects and language together coalesce into an introspective pattern of discovery. In Wrath of Juno, the continually jilted queen of the gods laments endless infatuations and betrayals, including her own, I simply think / the better choice, what makes / for dignity all around, is not / to touch. / But try telling that to a / man who thinks he's a shower of gold. Ten brilliantly etched new poems followed by a hand-picked collection of 50 poems from her previous five collections, spanning from Fire in the Conservatory (1982) to The Selvage (2012), make this one of the most important poetry volumes of the season.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)