Black Series: Poems

ISBN: 0375709657

Author: Sheck, Laurie

Condition: New

In her remarkable Black Series, Laurie Sheck turns the ordinary world inside out and shows us its glittering seams. Her long, elegantly quizzical lines convey a haunted vision of human striving which is in part an elaboration on our daily reality, and in part a fantastic departure from it. I can almost taste the glassy air, she writes. Where are the birds in it, / wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright / chaos of atomized instances . . . ? Roaming freely in the shifting landscape of the imagination, Sheck delivers an inner life that is just as vivid as what we see around us; at the same time, she shows us what we see in a new light, bringing illumination even to darkness:Its the black night that wakes in me,so dominant, so focused.And then a car goes by and I think,Im in the world,tires kicking up gravel from the dust.What does the orange hawkweed doinside this dark-its radiancesecretive but not extinguished?To read this collection is to discover at every turn that secretive but undeniable radiance, and a language that is both riveting and distinctive.