Feathering Deep

Parsons’ third collection of poems, as in his previous books, carries the reader too many geographies, both physical and cerebral. The poems, perhaps his most eclectic and revealing, return to Austin, Texas, in the turbulent and carnal sixties, the sublime Hill Country streams, north to Montana’s Mystic Lake and hallowed Indian battle grounds, and with the deftness of a wise and worldly guide, you will travel the tender valves of the heart, where all creativity finds its passion, to the very quay, that zone between reality and the possible, what Garcia Lorca called duende.FEATHERING DEEPAfter Edward Hirsch’s“The Angel and the Demon”I believe it to beunlike any otherconveyancethe manner in whichit carries us inupon its own silencethe way an idea driftsinto the grey dividewhere we find ourselvesin that sacred state—easingquietly into the dark duendeto unconscious understandinga lone canoe at midnight—bladespaddling deep—smoothlyand deftly feathering that largest of bodies