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Radial Symmetry (2011)

by Katherine Larson(Favorite Author)

4.28 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0300169205 (ISBN13: 9780300169201)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Yale University Press

review 1: So this was on the "to-read" shelf for over a year, and after plowing through it last night I recall why. I read/study the poem "Statuary" in several classes every year, and it kinda blows my mind. It's the first poem in this collection, which I hoped would be full of similarly dazzling poems, and none of the other poems are its equal. Only two in fact--"Love at Thirty-Two Degrees" and "Risk"--are even in contention. Larson's no one-hit wonder, many of these poems are strong, but it starts on such a high note that it's hard not to be disappointed by what follows. So if the following poem doesn't blow your skirt up, please feel free to skip this collection:"Statuary"The late cranes throwingtheir necks to the wind staysomewhere betweenthe place that rain beginsand the p... morelace that it endsthey seem to exist just thereabove the horizon at leastI only see them that waytossed upagainst the gray Octoberlight not heavy enough for feet to be useful oruseless enough to makegravity untie its string. I’m sickof this stubbornnessbut the earthwormsseem to think it all rightthey move forwardand let the world passthrough them they eatand eat at it, content to connecteverything through the individual linksof their purple bodies to stayone place would be death. But somewhere betweenthe crane and the wormbetween the days I pass through and the days that passthrough meis the mind. And memorywhich outruns the body andgrief which arrests it.
review 2: There's a wonderful, smart introduction to this book by Louise Gluck, about, other things, beauty in contemporary poetry. Beauty is hugely, hugely important to me, and Gluck talks about why poets and readers often shy away from it (in part because it really inspires silence, rather than discourse, as a response). Anyway, Radial Symmetry is very, very beautiful, and this is one of the qualities that I loved best about it and that made it such a joy to read. It's also concerned with the enormous themes... love and transience and the fleeting very physical world... I never get tired of reading about those, and I'm always grateful when poems are brave enough to take them on and be beautiful at the same time. Katherine Larson is also a biologist, and her book is full of surprising and new (to me) details about marine life and dissection, but it's all accessible and not too science-y. So happy I read this. less

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