Open Books: Events
January 27, 2009 07:30 PM
EMILY WARN
“Is the wrestling of inchoate matter into form love?,” asks one of the several voices in Emily Warn’s third collection, The Shadow Architect ($15 Copper Canyon), a compelling meditation on the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It is a question perhaps asked of God, of us, of the writer of this mysterious yet vividly grounded series that contemplates the power of the word in the world. The poems are philosophical, but not at the expense of imagery -- “the cicadas handing off / their buckets of sand from tree to tree; / their toneless incessant scraping sifts time for us.” Elegantly organized (and gracefully designed), the book takes shape through a quietly insistent pattern that is its rhythm and melody, a cantata of lyric and quotation, of discovery, but perhaps more profoundly, of journey.
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