The Cataracts
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
Poetry as Escher: shifting perspective, a landscape that doesn’t stand still, and questions that fold in on themselves.
Your souls, if you have them,
depart without having spoken.
They issue reels and loops
of thread, filaments lengthened
by longing, coming apart
in the sky like the tails of a shower.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Now, every living person comes at the expense,/ to a greater or lesser degree, of every other living person," writes McDaniel (Special Powers and Abilities) in this sprawling but rich collection about perception and empathy. The eye, as a nexus of biological and ethical vision, anchors the poems' questions about global atrocity, film, biblical history, and community responsibility. McDaniel finds capability in what is usually understood as a handicap, for example writing of nearsightedness: "my handwriting was imperceptible without magnification, but, magnified, proved impeccable." The narratively driven poems turn from colloquial storytelling to beautiful lyric descriptions, as in a poem about Star Trek that describes a diamond as "the making of pearl inverted." Often, it feels as if the contradictions McDaniel finds couldn't be expressed any other way: "If in the present you see what you cannot believe,/ you call what you see a vision, as if the means by which you would see/ what cannot be there becomes synonymous with the thing/ you cannot see." Even though there are a few too many poems included here, touching too often on similar questions, McDaniel renders each poem's discoveries with a worthwhile particularity.