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Open Books: Event Archive
May 25, 2006 07:30 PM
RICK BAROT & GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI
Mr. Barot's inaugural collection, The Darker Fall (Sarabande $12.95), is lush with the world. His strikingly visual poems are not merely snapshots; they glow with the illumination of a sensitive, sensual, and lyrical intelligence -- "The potted tulip leans into itself / unconflicted, canting its head / like a listener / to the room's brighter half." Flowers, birds, the sky draw the poet's keen eye, but so do a city's glass-strewn street, a stained bedroom ceiling, a pawnshop's display, and of course the self, with its physical and intellectual desires. The poems in Ms. Calvocoressi's first volume, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea $13.95), are primarily set in the past, but their skillful imagery and careful imagining make them vividly present. The title poem is a moving meditation on the iconic pilot's disappearance, presented in a range of voices. A miner bemoans his daughter's fixation on Earhart, as well as the life he offers her -- "She says, 'I think it's romantic // to disappear.'" I bite my tongue / to keep from telling her / she'll get her chance." The acknowledgement of struggle, disappointment, loss -- economic, sexual, mortal - runs throughout the book in a way that is unsentimental yet deeply humane.
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