In Darwin's Room
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
An artful new collection from a poet who sees the extraordinary within the everyday
In her tenth volume of poetry, Debora Greger looks outward from the broadmindedness of the interior. Whether she finds herself in Venice, in London, or young again in the sagebrush desert of her childhood, the reader may feel Greger is both there and not there—her landscapes are haunted by memory, even in the act of experience. Not shying from the raw or savage in life, not ignoring the small moments of salvation or grace, she finds in every room an entrance to another world. Darwin’s college quarters prove not far from his cabin on the Beagle. A dress shop in Virginia reveals itself a Federal parlor through which a battle of the Civil War was fought. Returning to old scenes with a new eye, Greger proves herself a poet of quiet cunning, of grand scenes and small awakenings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greger (By Herself) stitches together a work of nostalgic reflections, whimsical narratives, and odes to those who have filled her imagination. She is an old-fashioned poet with a modern eye, bewitching in her handling of the ordinary and without a trace of opacity. Greger envisions a variety of anthropomorphic perspectives. Adopting the role of a spider, she writes, "From the eye of a buttonhole// in a shirt abandoned on a chair,/ I watch your beloved sleep on the couch,/ mouth ajar." While contemplating her stark, Catholic upbringing, Greger delivers one of her more humorous lines: "On Mother's Day/ the priest poured fire and brimstone/ on spaghetti straps." She also cinematically illustrates her disenchantment with the age of technology, noting how in an old theater "Cell phone screens constellated the dark/ with their empty light-years." Of Greger's various elegies, her most fanciful is dedicated to her English teacher: "Her virtuous hand no, her red-nailed,/ vulturous claw rattled the chalk." In a collection chock-full of endearing literary references and lexical mastery, Greger manages to conjure an eternal present that reverberates with times past.
