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Open Books: Events
November 16, 2008 03:00 PM
LINDA BIERDS
For over two decades, Linda Bierds has been writing graceful poems of
unassuming yet rigorous intelligence. Now work from all of her previous
collections, along with fifteen new poems, has been gathered in one volume,
Flight ($24.95 Putnam). History and the imagination merge in her poetry, so that worlds past are not merely illuminated but made vitally animate. Her keen sense of wonder and curiosity frequently leads her to contemplate,
investigate, and even speak through artists and scientists. How fitting that
Albrecht Dürer and Neil Armstrong share one of her poems. As she explains,
the astronaut stroked the engraver's initials in the lunar dust -- "Think of
two men, / each at his milky page, thirst and the dipper / a moment away,
and the whole unbroken before them." Indeed, deeply realized biography often
provides the frame for her descriptive, thoughtful, and thought-provoking
work.
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