Gap Gardening

Starred review from April 18, 2016
Arriving nearly 20 years after Waldrop released her first volume of selected poems, Another Language, this new book tracks her scintillating mind through four decades of aesthetic and intellectual development. From the spare, quick-breathed, and short-lined poems of her early years through a progression into prose poems—the form that dominates here—readers will find ongoing, assiduous explorations of fundamental questions about embodiment, perception, and memory. Waldrop is sublimely attuned to the relational as she charts space, grammar, colonial power, and the erotic, all of which figure importantly. A hallmark of her work is that its subject matter is held ever askew; one feels “always on the verge/ or seeing it/ there/ on the edge/ of the horizon.” As the title suggests, Waldrop attends especially to lacunae, the never-quite-bridgeable spaces between words, people, language, and experience. She makes that absence a guiding principle of her poetics. “The four points of the compass are equal on the lawn of the excluded middle,” she writes, “the empty space at the center of each poem to allow penetration.” Some poems make use of collage and erasure, and all create tension between continuity and disjuncture, sound and silence. Taken together, they stand testament to a career of innovation and affirm Waldrop’s essential contributions to 20th- and 21st-century literature.