Dailies and Rushes: Poems (Grove Press Poetry)

Dailies and Rushes opens with the disappointment of a present not received: "And so / it's been in all my words and hopes: / poems, the elusive gift, the microscope." In the poems that follow, Susan Kinsolving holds a kind of microscope to the visible world, examining jellyfish, blossoms, animals, fruit. What she finds there, as often as not, is the self writ small: "We are collectors," the poem "Dried Butterflies" announces, "gathering information, artifacts / icons of identification / glass-cased or closet-closed." As poet, Kinsolving collects the artifacts of her own identity with an almost archaeological zeal. Through some extremely personal poems about divorce, death, and breakdown, Kinsolving retains both the wry distance of a scientist and the urgency of a prophet. Her keen ear is matched here only by her formal skill; in lines crammed full of wordplay and wit, she packs puns both verbal and visual as well as unobtrusive, sometimes off-kilter rhymes. "At the last, things grow precious," she tells us in "The Garden Green, The Garden Gone," her genuinely scary poem about the end of the world. Despite our claims of innocence, we've known the answers all along, she tells us, the knowledge "just a bit beyond, something / like the space Michelangelo made between / God's hand and Adam's." It's in this space that Kinsolving seeks to inscribe her poems--in the gap between inspiration and creation, knowledge and memory, self and other. We are all "ultimate divisions along a common stalk," as "The Dictionary Under Mountain Fringe" puts it, and it's this paradox that both animates these poems and saves them from tragedy. --Chloe Byrne