Algebra

from Bagatelles Bagatelles, mere gestures in dry air, each pluck a dot, strokes marked on silence reaching into the dark. Beauty is strict, it passes: an echo, a wedge of harmony, sudden, broken - Who goes there? "An Algebra" is an interwoven collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, where images and phrases recur in new contexts, connecting and suspending thoughts, emotions, and insights. By turns, the poems leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream, from elegy to lyric evocation. Wholeness and brokenness intertwine in the book; glimpsed patterns and startling disjunctions drive its explorations. "An Algebra" is a work of changing equivalents, a search for balance in a world of transformation and loss. It is a brilliantly constructed, moving book by a poet who has achieved a new level of imaginative expression and skill.