~EDWARD BYRNE~
TIME AND SPACE:
LINDA BIERDS’S FIRST HAND
Frequent readers of Bierds’s poetry become
comfortable
with her
reliably revealing and rewarding voice,
particularly the resonance in
its pitch as it evokes
images or emotions through
language that is
reasoned
and ardent, informational and
emotive.
How much safer to enter a time, a
space,
when a swan might lift from a
palace pond
to cross for an instant—above,
below—its outstretched
Çygnus shape, just a
membrane
and membrane away. A space
in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular
alignment—
carbon, shadow, membrane,
flight—sufficient for the moment.
—Linda Bierds,
“Time and Space”
In an author’s note that prefaces First Hand (Putnam, 2004), the
seventh collection of poetry by Linda Bierds (released nearly two
decades after her first full-length volume, Flights of the Harvest-Mare, in
1985), she proposes her poems in this book be seen as wavering between
two states of mind, wending their way from “wonder” to “foreboding,”
pieces that “rest most frequently at the inscape of science.”
Readers familiar with Bierds’s previous works will find no surprise in
the types of most poems contained within First Hand, tight lyrical portraits
or finely viewed vignettes engaged in presenting a close-up focus on
one imagined moment in the life of an historical figure, preferably a
noted scientist or artist, accompanied by an insightful contemplation
and eloquently phrased observations spoken by the persona in the poem.
Over the years, a long list of prominent personae
have appeared in Bierds’s books of poetry, including Thomas Edison,
Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Eadweard Muybridge, Wilbur Wright, D.H.
Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Zelda
Fitzgerald, Ludwig van Beethoven, Matthew Brady, Jan Vermeer, James
Whistler, Andrew Wyeth, Marc Chagall, and a multitude of others.
Sometimes the persons selected to be included in the poetry are
presented in informal situations or in stages of their lives, perhaps
childhood or during one’s dying days,
outside the age when they
received the most notable attention. Often, these public
personalities are depicted during fictionalized private times or bits
of personal reflection as Bierds attempts to place the reader inside
the eyes of these historic individuals (one might say she gives us a
first-hand glimpse), permitting at least a partial — in both senses of
the word: qualified and skewed — identification with each of these
figures, allowing for a sense of shared perception and an intimate
glance into the way these extraordinary characters view the world in
which they find themselves. Indeed, a common characteristic that
seems to be evident in these luminaries of the sciences and arts is
their ability to examine the subjects of their studies closely,
interpreting what they view with an analytical or imaginative mind that
detects details revealing secrets and suggesting deeper meanings,
enabling a greater understanding of the people and objects scrutinized.
Therefore, although frequent readers of recent
poetry, particularly of Bierds’s books, may see a familiar formation of
descriptive historical poems as witnessed in past collections of her
work, these same readers will recognize once again how distinctive her
approach to poetry appears when contrasted with the publications by
most other contemporary poets. In volume after volume Bierds
remains almost totally invisible, reticent about injecting her own
autobiographical self into the poems or disclosing herself as the
primary persona. At a time when much of American poetry — perhaps
American fiction, as well, where many novels increasingly resemble
memoirs — appears designed merely to offer observations and experiences
by a narrator or persona who sometimes seems no more than a disguised
version of the writer, and perhaps not even that camouflaged or
distanced from the person who authored the work, Linda Bierds prefers
to present personae usually clearly separate from her own identity and,
more than likely, placed at a remote distance from her existence by far
reaches in their chronological era and geographical locale. Such
a gap in time and space between the poet and the subjects of her poetry
allows Bierds a number of options that might not otherwise be available
to her, and the result often proves to be a distinctive poetry
recognizable as belonging to Bierds.
In this manner, Bierds has created an individual
body of work the past two decades that is always refreshingly different
and repeatedly satisfying in its originality. Bierds’s poems
explore territory not well traveled by many of her fellow poets, an
area where scientific thought and poetic language complement one
another to an extent that attentions given the descriptive process, as
well as its initial stage of intuitive instinct, evident in each field
seem to blend together. Consequently, the technical precision of
science and the imaginative revision of art presented by this poet
enlarge the possibilities of further understanding intricate aspects of
our world. Just as the composition of the most minute aspects of
physical matter are magnified by a microscope, Bierds’s poetry, through
the use of numerous personae, zooms in on those emotional elements of
readers’ lives that may matter most. In the same way a research
scientist discovers new perspectives by gazing into the micro-world of
various atoms, chromosome chains, or other sectors of a human single
cell, this inquisitive poet’s curious personae also unveil novel
perceptions by delving into the world of the inventive mind, the
impulse of a creative spirit, and one’s sense of self. While the
objective and rational mind of the scientist is naturally impressed by
learned factual information, the sensitive soul of the artist is
informed by learning to interpret nature’s facts into subjective
impressions. Yet, in Bierds’s poetry both paths lead toward
greater enlightenment and enrichment for readers. Indeed, the two
seem to need one another for a more complete contemplation of a
fulfilling final destination. As Bierds suggests in “Prodigy,” a
poem involving the persona of Benjamin Franklin as a young boy
questioning the relationships between differing elements and discerning
their more subtle connections: “That / is the secret, isn’t it?
To be at once / all body, all soul. That is the key.”
In “Prodigy” the young Franklin is depicted,
standing in a pond holding a kite aloft, as “a staple / binding the
elements.” As he walks into the water, the boy notices “how the
pond erases his shadow / in equal proportion / to the body its water
accepts. Until, as shadow, / he is nothing, just head and an
upraised arm.” Throughout this collection of poems, images recur,
including some involving the body displacing elements around it,
perhaps being replaced by shadow or having the shadow of the self
absorbed, at another time maybe exhibiting mixed characteristics of
light and dark. In this poem, the boy’s body is “pulled by the
wind, half fish, half bird.” Through such metaphors, Linda Bierds
undertakes the principal position of symbolically uniting body and
soul, fastening detected factual findings to inspired moments of
emotional disclosure.
The breadth of imagined instances or actions Bierds
recounts in First Hand
includes individuals and
situations spanning more than two millennia. The poet remarks in
her author’s note that the context of events contained in this
collection “moves from third-century-B.C. theories of buoyancy to
twenty-first-century biochemistry.” Such a study inherently
stretches across evolving cultural and religious attitudes toward
social consequences of scientific inquiry or invention. Indeed,
the historic conflict between science and faith — recorded times when
certain social institutions and accepted mores determined a tension,
even a considered contradiction, existed between particular
advancements in scientific knowledge and established political tenets
or dominant church teachings — is presented as a crucial concern
addressed in this volume.
This issue is raised in the passages of description,
narration, and
meditation delivered by the speakers in the poems. Remarkably,
through the conjured historical situations chronicled in this volume,
Bierds indirectly submits material for introspection on a number of
topical controversies. Her poetry sometimes provides
unconventional background for thought when regarding the ethical
debates and moral dilemmas confronting contemporary readers at a time
of rapid forward movement in scientific pioneering, especially with the
promising advancements in medical discoveries, the capacity of
cutting-edge methods in patient treatments, and the prospects of cures
for catastrophic diseases. Bierds realizes the intimations of
potential life-and-death questions summoned forth by the substance in
some of her poems. As she states in the book’s introductory
commentary, Bierds is cognizant the volume’s extended line of inquiry
“must acknowledge what are for many the global and spiritual
implications of a science increasingly adept at creating, extending,
and annihilating life.”
By writing poems mostly populated with personalities
of the past, Bierds subtly and smartly invites readers to enter with
little resistance into compelling situations holding difficult choices
or accompanying abstract debates that are similar to ones encountered
in our present-day environment and sometimes can easily be seen boldly
highlighted in today’s newspaper headlines. In addition, the
entertaining and illuminating nature of Bierds’s poetry, set forth in
elegant descriptive lines and tender lyric rhythm, serves to captivate
readers, charming them into interest and attention before they might
even realize they have been captured, have become a captive audience
detained perhaps just long enough to reflect upon the gravity of the
works’ underlying philosophical or theoretical notions about
intersecting lines in science and art, the friction caused by discord
between intellect and faith, and the very essence of agonizing
life-and-death decisions.
Indeed, one feels almost obligated to begin
discussion on any book of poetry by Linda Bierds with acknowledgment of
how her elegantly illustrative language consistently provides delight
to the eyes and ears of readers, inducing an immediately sympathetic
engagement with the poems’ personae and their predicaments from nearly
every visitor to the visualized surroundings contained within their
stanzas. In fact, it is both ironic and appropriate that Bierds
applies the quality of “elegance” to a third-century-B.C. scientist,
Archimedes — the great mathematician known for his superior
intelligence, but also remembered as being a practical individual — in
a poem carrying that one word of characterization, “Elegance,” as its
title.
“Elegance” recounts the instance when Archimedes
famously shouted “Eureka!” as he proved the displacement of water and
principles of buoyancy merely by stepping “naked and tufted” into a
tub. The definition of “elegance” to which Bierds directs readers is
not the commonly thought meaning of a graceful and stylish manner, but
that which applies to science when a mathematical proof is neatly
demonstrated through simplicity and precision. As the poet notes,
“once within the tub’s cool grip / several stones departed, skipped
suddenly away, / soundlessly, invisibly, as the soul’s clear
micro-ounce // is said to skip across death’s placid water.” As
easily as that, Bierds positions the scientific and the spiritual, the
stones and the soul, the palpable and the intangible, permitting
readers an opportunity to experience an intersection of the two.
Reading about Archimedes’ entrance into the tub and the displacement of
water, one also might be reminded of the passage in “Prodigy” where
Franklin steps “off from the shoreline” and the water accepts his
body. Further in “Elegance,” Bierds also connects the past with
the present, bridging those centuries between Archimedes and more
modern times:
Twenty centuries would pass
before a taper maker, weighted
with years of weightless ash,
would blend
the sootless, smokeless candle,
and cleanse the walls
where Archimedes walked.
Later, Bierds draws a comparison between human and
nature, between Archimedes, whose “secret lay with feasting — a feed
for bees,” and the bees, described as “buoyant, tufted bodies.”
However, with this poem’s play on a single word, “elegance,” Bierds
also elegantly uses simplicity and precision to indicate an
intersecting line between science and art, where elegance is also a
virtue. In fact, although the characteristic of “elegance” is
attached to a scientific event within the lines of this poem, readers
could equally see the closing stanza as featuring the more familiar
usage of “elegance,” an attribute again now relating to art and its
potential for a greater clarity, as an especially essential quality in
Bierds’s own poetry:
Elegant, that formula, that
sudden click of harmony
when facts aligned, and matter,
from the bee or from
the bath, lost not itself but
simply its perimeter.
Elegant, that sudden shift beyond
the eye, that soundless
click: clear stone across some
greater clarity.
In “Prologue,” the premiere piece in the collection,
Bierds gives readers a glimpse at the childhood figure of Galileo, just
as she presents the boyhood figure of Benjamin Franklin in
“Prodigy.” “Prologue” opens with an ominous image in which
“oblong clouds swell and darken. / And hailstones lift back through the
updrafts, / thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs” they
drop from the sky above Florence. When the hailstones pound to
the ground, in his imagination Galileo envisions horses, “the shock of
ten thousand icy hooves.” Already a curious character, Galileo
seeks to examine the insides of those frozen stones; yet, the only
sharp tool at hand appears to be a “length of E-string” from one of the
violins his father has been tuning. In an image depicting a
simple act that clearly combines science and art, the young Galileo
slices through the ice, “the white globe opening slowly, and the
pattern inside / already bleeding its frail borders” as they melt from
the friction of the string, and the boy’s crude scientific experiment
in dissection is accompanied by “a hint of song.”
Similarly, Bierds’s poetry continually persuades
readers about an overlapping of perceptive patterns in science and art,
not only by the content of the poems or the painterly images with which
she draws delicately descriptive portraits, but also by the way each
lyric carries its own “hint of song” as it recounts episodes in the
personal lives or more public intellectual pursuits of those scientists
so vividly depicted within the graceful lines she writes. When
she begins “Thinking of Red,” a poem picturing Marie Curie (previously
seen as a persona in Bierds’s last collection of poems, The Seconds) in the year of her
death, apparently as a result of her work with radiation, the details
are both technical and Technicolor, contain an appearance of accuracy
and a sense of dramatic veracity. The lines look to be loaded
with intellectual acuity and visual acuity as they perform at a precise
pitch:
Back from the workbench and lamp,
the tilt
of the microscope’s mantis head,
back from the droplet
of sea, salted by powdered radium,
and the lift and swirl of its
atoms—the buffed
invisible globes of its atoms—she
sat
with her apple and knife,
confined to her wide bed.
One of the personages presented by Bierds in First Hand, the English physicist
and inventor Charles Vernon Boys, is shown in “Desire” on an autumn day
in 1879 as the poet contemplates sound, image, science, art, nature,
and the idea of God all in one brief piece. Initially, readers
are introduced to Boys caught during a process of musically disturbing
the movement of molecules as he “touched to a spider’s quiet web a
silver tuning fork, / its long A swimming a warp line, up and
up.” As previously seen in “Prodigy,” Bierds again mixes a
musical element within the steps of a scientific experiment.
However, the note of music the narrator — presumably, the poet — hears
on a similar morning more than a century later “is organ-cast,
cathedral bound, and the sleeve / this sunlight banks across / drapes
in tempura from a saint’s clasped hands,” and the speaker imagines how
“the sunlight must have banked at this degree / across his buttoned
sleeve.” In one of only a few times the author editorializes as a
possible speaker inside the poems, the poet, as first-person persona,
contemplates upon her perceptions of those objects she observes and the
sound she hears, amazed by an artist’s ability to render reality with
his handiwork: “Godless in this God-filled room, I’m drawn less / to
the saint’s sacrificial fate than to the way / like instruments vibrate
sympathetically, or how this painter’s ratio of bone to powdered umber
/ precisely captures a dove’s blunt beak.” Her attraction
to the musical notes and the rudimentary composition of the paint
within the brush strokes she sees reflects Bierds’s focus on the
significant presence of sight and sound in her own work, how like the
scientist she turns to physical evidence for her perceptions and for
material with terms or language that supplies music within her poetry.
Yet, a crucial center of interest or activity within
First Hand is the
issue of faith freighted with the corresponding difficulty of existing
conflicts between the pursuit of practical scientific explanations for
the workings of this world and a belief in God’s mysterious making of
the universe. Indeed, as Bierds had done in previous
volumes, numerous images, phrases, and personae recur within the covers
of this book. Most significantly, Bierds has selected a
particular persona for repeated appearances in poems throughout the
book. In First Hand,
Bierds concentrates on the life and livelihood of a fascinating
character, the nineteenth-century geneticist and monk, Gregor
Mendel. As Bierds explains in the book’s prefatory note:
I’ve turned to the character of
Gregor Mendel, whose work
on the hybridization of peas
foreshadowed genetic cloning.
Mendel, for years carefully
capping in calico his newly
impregnated pea blossoms, labored
at Saint Thomas Monastery,
in Moravia, where he lived as a
monk from 1843 until his death
in 1884. Augustinian in its
habits, the monastery encouraged
research, which often included
the cross-breeding of plants and
animals. This activity,
advancing for the monks an understanding
of the complexities of Creation,
was seen by the monastery to be
completely compatible with
worship. Others disagreed.
Early in the collection, Bierds introduces Mendel as an individual
enchanted by measurements, mesmerized by mathematics, regarding numbers
as his childhood companions. Calibration and categorization are
compelling for Mendel. He is enthralled with facts and figures,
and “Counting: Gregor Mendal in the Prelacy” calls attention to how he
continually cites statistical computation: “That first stalk / six
posts from the gate, and the gate / twelve strides from the
pond.” As Bierds reports in typically lyrical lines, Mendel
possesses a keen eye that appreciates the physical world when viewed so
closely and so completely:
Each winter, I loved the ermine’s
harmony,
how it stitched over fresh drifts
the parallel pricks of its
tracks. And the pale,
symmetrical petals of snow, how
they covered
our seventy houses, our eight
hundred
yoke of good arable, good
meadowland,
our four hundred ninety souls.
Presenting Gregor Mendel as a primary subject in her
poetry, Bierds provides readers with a persona representative of the
conflicted scientist, whether historic or contemporary, seeking to
unlock mysteries of the physical world while maintaining a vigorous
faith in the mysteries of the spiritual world. By extension, this
poetic persona and his actions also show evidence of the intrinsic
clash — often attendant and sometimes inevitable — between a search for
knowledge and a trust in one’s religious beliefs, a pair of pursuits at
constant risk of incompatibility with each other for inquisitive people
who maintain a great faith. Such outer contradictions between
conclusions of laboratory experiments or observed results of scientific
procedure and long-held religious convictions that may shape one’s
sentiments toward church teachings or the existence and nature of God
could cause an emotional response of inner consternation. This
difficult choice between two alternative views, scientific and
religious, and a driving desire to combine gained knowledge with
ongoing faith supply ripe topics for Bierds’s writing.
Consequently, Mendel’s concern surfaces as he expresses himself,
emphasizing the systematic operation of thought through his repetition
of “think”: “Holy Father, do not
think that I think of you less / when I think of you mathematically.”
Trinity College student Isaac Newton grapples with
similar apprehension and anxiety in “The Trinity Years.” As the
young man lists “his sins” alongside mathematical and scientific
questions in a journal, he includes the following: “Not living according to my belief.”
Newton wonders why he should experience a sense of guilt for his
questioning and scientific works, even when performed on a day of
worship:
What of wonder?
Piety? The clash of desire and reverence?
Making a feather pen on Thy Day.
Making a mousetrap on Thy
Day.
Making a cord, contriving
the chimes, making a water watch—
on Thy Day.
And how, despite the day, could
the Heavens reject
those twisted cords, and feather
pens, those
ceaseless meditations, heating the braine to distraction?
How, in light of Creation’s
complexity, could devotion
stand free from inquiry, vast
love from articulation?
But presence of the Mendel persona recurs frequently
in this volume as the principal proponent for the possibility of
coexisting interests — science and theology, the physical and the
spiritual, desire and devotion, rational thought and emotional
sentiment, traditional values and modern mores, intellectual studies
and religious beliefs, knowledge and faith. In “Gregor Mendel and
the Calico Caps,” Mendel is the speaker who acknowledges the objections
of others to his experiments cross-breeding plants or animals, the work
to which he commits himself with so much dedication and vigor.
The poem opens with an image of Mendel’s meticulous activities in
cultivating pea blossoms:
With tweezers
light as a pigeon’s beak,
I have clipped
from each stamen a pollen-filled anther:
hour by hour,
three hundred tiny beads, dropped
in my robe’s
deep pocket, their yellow snuff
sealing the
seam lines.
Mendel recognizes that he is altering the course of
nature, tinkering with the God-given world, “to mingle seed // fixed in
the swirl of the world’s first week,” and that some see such
interference as clearly sinful, contrary to orthodox religious
doctrine: “Heresy, some say.” Nevertheless, Mendel believes his
work furthers legitimate inquiry by making beneficial use of his mind’s
intellect, also a gift bestowed by God. In fact, Bierds arranges
Mendel’s description of his actions in a manner that contains a simile
carrying connotations of pious intention and muted assent: “I have tied
to each blossom a calico cap. Three hundred / calico caps.
From afar in this late-day light, / they nod like parishioners in an
open field.” Thus, Mendel regards his labor as a necessary part
of fulfilling his purpose on this earth, perhaps just as the pattern of
calico caps are seen “on the widening arc / of some grand
design.” Mendel may even assess his task as one valuable way to
prove himself worthy: “Heresy? Have I not been placed on that
widening path? // Am I not, in my calling, among them?”
With a pattern similar to what readers have seen in
her previous collections, Bierds has spaced throughout the book a
series of four short italicized poems, each involving Gregor Mendel
addressing God in prayer, bearing titles (“Matins,” “Terce,” “Sext,”
and “Vespers”) referring to times of canonical hours set aside for
public worship. Again, Bierds blends Mendel’s two passions,
participation in serving science by cataloging the particulars in the
physical world around him and a reverence for religious tradition
through participation in ritual services. Elsewhere, in “Gregor
Mendel and the Cats,” Mendel speaks of painting blue the backboards of
the monastery’s bookcases. The poem discloses Mendel’s thoughts
on the importance of using the mind (“We are minds here,” he begins) as
well as the body (“And hands,” he continues), stretching one’s
intellect for both practical knowledge and imaginative purposes.
In his dreams, the monk visits the monastery library. Surrounded
by “abbots and brothers,” Mendel also discovers the “works of Aquinas,
Kepler, / Linnaeus, Sophocles, open before us.” In his waking
hours, “stained sunlight hovers” from the windows of the library.
However, Mendel finds a different attraction in his imagination:
But the light I am drawn to,
in dream after dream,
glows out from the bookcase
shelves,
slender and patternless. A
glass-cast, vertical,
feral blue, it shimmers from gaps
where the works of the mind are
missing.
In “Vespers: Gregor Mendel and Steam,” the last poem
of the four linked with the canonical hours for prayer, Mendel
continues to connect science and faith, though again he is ultimately
drawn to a “gap.” After listing various observed instances of
steam plumes seen with his scientist’s eyes — such as “from the teapot’s throat” or “the breaths of the winter ewes”
— and noticing the nightfall lowering over everything, Mendel
wonders:
Nightfall. Nightfall. Dark Breach
between breath and ewe.
And what force, what force, now,
will carry our dormant
souls?
Not breath. Not cloud.
Not plume. Not
plume. Not
shape—Holy Father—but gap.
Despite this scientist’s best efforts at
understanding the puzzling patterns of the physical universe, the monk
in him repeatedly seems reminded of other mysteries beyond solved
mathematical equations or meticulous evaluations about the makings of
the material world apparent around him. Mendel returns to the
absences of knowledge, unexplained events, imagined spaces, or
enigmatic gaps where any true comprehension of life and death remains
incomplete or incalculable, fragile or tenuous, and only a spiritual
reliance on one’s faith will suffice. Reviewing the group of
Gregor Mendel poems in First Hand,
readers likely will recall the prefatory statement by Bierds cited
earlier about “global and spiritual implications” when encountering “a
science increasingly adept at creating, extending, and annihilating
life.”
At times, Linda Bierds playfully patterns her poetry
to imitate the subject under discussion. For example, “DNA”
depicts James Watson “at play” in his Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge
University during February of 1953, a time (nearly ten years before his
Nobel Prize recognition) when this noted scientist made a momentous
discovery and first proposed the complementary double-helix, or
“twisted ladder,” for the structure of DNA, the genetic map of
life. This revelation allowed for the conclusion that the two
chains or “lines” of the helix could be separated to create a pair of
identical copies. The clever poem Bierds shows readers follows in
this manner since it is a pantoum, formed by alternately repeating
identical lines of poetry in a pattern throughout the piece, while
beginning and closing the poem with the same line as well.
Likewise, in “Sunderance,” meaning to split or
sever, Bierds’s stanza lengths are halved each time through the poem,
and a centered asterisk stands between each stanza to further segment
the work. The first stanza contains sixteen lines, the second has
eight, the third holds four, the fourth consists of only two, and a
final one-line stanza ends the poem. This form reflects the
content of the poem, in which “eight hundred fur-capped men” are
involved with ice fishing only a few miles from shore, “the far soires
of St. Petersburg” in the distance and no longer in sight, when the
pack ice cracks and isolates them. In the second stanza, readers
learn:
All day, all night, helicopters
dropped
their
wire hammocks, and no one was lost,
though the floe fractured, then
fractured again,
and the
flock split, re-split, until only
a few remained, facedown on their
single pallets.
By the third stanza, the poet once more raises the
idea of God and the strength of faith or the doubt a human might
entertain in a life-and-death situation, as one of those left compares
the floes to motes “afloat in God’s compound eye. Except earth
was not / the body of God.” When the poem winnows to two lines
and then one in its final pair of stanzas, Bierds reveals: “all that
was mercy could be forged firsthand: / those double blades that
thwacked all night above him // and the single one that wed him to the
ice.” Even in these sectors of the poem, she cleverly adds an
amusing bit of craftiness by alluding first to the “double blades” of
the helicopters hovering above and then to “the single one,” the blade
of “a penknife fixed in the ice” by which, we have learned, each man
clung for his life.
Unlike other poems in the book, Bierds doesn’t
identify a source for the event related in this piece. However, a
search of news items suggests the incident in the poem mirrors a
situation that happened on northwestern Russia’s Lake Ladoga in
late-winter 2000 when rising temperatures caused an early and
unexpected melt, although similar cases of stranded fishermen on ice in
the waters near St. Petersburg occur nearly every year. At times,
comprehending archival information in Bierds’s poetry does demand a
greater degree of active intellectual involvement, perhaps even
firsthand research, by readers. Nevertheless, while
searching for information is sometimes required for a full
understanding of clues embedded within the content of the poems in each
of Bierds’s books (and may be a contributing factor that hinders her
ability to attract a larger audience), when engaging in the process one
can achieve a certain amount of satisfaction and delight, not to
mention enlightenment about some lesser-known facets of historical
events or individuals.
Another poem, “Errand,” does not directly identify
its source, but the subject is easily recognized by readers as
concerning the 1996 cloning of a lamb named Dolly through somatic cell
nuclear transfer. More than a century since Mendel’s death,
scientific experiments with genetic cloning have brought the high pitch
of moral questions, raised then by some during his attempts at
hybridization or cross-breeding of plants and animals, to a new level
over humans’ manipulation of nature and interference in the normal
sequences of creation or natural development — during reproductive
cloning, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, stem cell research,
or other methods — often with life-and-death consequences. Now,
“this common Dorset lamb” resembles “her mother — that is, her genetic
double.” The mother lamb is shown as she “lolls at a water
trough, dangling her face / near its glassy other” lured by the
reflection of herself. At a moment like this, Bierds reflects on
the start of such experiments by Mendel more than a century earlier:
Old now, reflection’s
selfsame lure. And old, the
century
that would have found him on his
knees, parting
the earth for resemblances:
bloodroot and mandrake,
heartleaf, the liver-lobed
hepatica—
each with its dusty errand: to
close from death
the body it mirrored. Or
there by the fence line,
through an outburst of blue, the
lung-shaped leaves
of borage, to reopen the body to
breath.
The poems in First
Hand contain a variety of allusions to art and artists, science
and scientists, life and death, mortality and timelessness, faith and
God, often from surprising perspectives. “Sans Merci,” a dark but
lovely lyrical poem, concentrates on the dwindling days of John Keats’s
life. However, the scene of the great poet, whose work would
remain immortal, in his dying days is given indirectly through the
point of view held by his attendants, a maid and Joseph Severn, a good
friend of Keats’s brother George who had also become close to the poet
and tended to him during his terminal illness. Severn, himself a
painter, had accompanied Keats on his journey in Italy. In his
last letters, Keats speaks of Severn, who served as a caretaker and
nursed Keats until his death in 1821. Upon Severn’s death more
than half a century later, his dying wish to be buried beside Keats was
granted. Indeed, Keats’s near absence physically from the lines
in “Sans Merci” correlates to his diminished health and an already
lessened presence of life as Keats withdrew to his room:
Away, the maid called in her
small voice,
and Severn pulled the tray away,
up
on its polished ropes, up
from Rome’s rain-washed Spanish
steps:
rabbit flanks on a pewter plate,
a linen napkin’s cool meringue,
all climbing
the inn’s exterior wall, then
pulled
through a window where Keats lay
dying.
Elsewhere, in “Ecstasy,” Bierds finds scientific
insight from an unusual source with an atypical biography for an
inventor, but one that perfectly pairs the worlds of art and
science. In 1942, as the world was at war and the images of movie
actress Hedy Lamarr filled silver screens across the United States, she
almost accidentally came upon a discovery that might help the war
effort. Once, while playing piano alongside avant-garde composer
George Antheil, legend has it that the two suddenly discovered a
jam-proof communications system involving frequency hopping which could
be adapted for military use. As Bierds reports the moment, the
two are playing keys an octave apart on the piano:
He was playing a riff.
She followed. Again, then
again, impulse
and echo, call and response, and
Look,
she whispered, we are talking in
code,
our sweet locution seamless,
unbreakable.
After patenting her discovery, Hedy Lamarr returns
to her roles on film, an image of light amid the darkness of the movie
theater: “Emulsion and light, she was less than a girl, / onion-skin
thin on a waxy screen.” Bierds appears to be voicing the surprise
many in the nation might have experienced in learning Hedy Lamarr had
invented a system for directing guided weapons in warfare: “How
innocent her image then, as out through / the century’s cone-lit rooms,
a nation sank / into velvet
chairs.”
With “Nineteen Thirty-four” Bierds submits to
readers another poem that supplies a surprising perspective by
combining the works of a scientist and an artist. Marie Curie,
appearing again, and painter Paul Cadmus are the principal personae,
while Paris and the Atlantic shoreline along the coast of New York
provide the settings: “Radiant, in the Paris sun, the clustered chairs
/ and canopies, the clustered leaves . . ..” Bierds describes
Curie in the Radium Institute where she works — just before her 1934
death from leukemia brought on by the high amounts of radiation —
taking “in her blackened, slender fingers a finger-shaped // tube of
radiation. And the blue Atlantic, radiant, / the American shore,
the gold-flecked palette / Paul Cadmus lifts.”
In 1934 Cadmus caused a great deal of controversy
while a participant in the WPA when one of his paintings, The Fleet’s In, was removed from an
exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art due to a public outcry over its
content of sexually suggestive behavior by rowdy sailors on leave and
the women with them, as well as its inclusion of an apparently
homosexual man. The painting was held from public view until
1982, and again this work was the target of complaints by women
visitors to The Navy Museum in 1993 for perceived depiction of sexual
harassment by the sailors in the artwork. Nevertheless, the
painting continues to hang on display in The Navy Museum. The
same year The Fleet’s In
created so much of a stir, Cadmus also painted Coney Island, another even larger
group scene that includes beachgoers building a human pyramid, as well
as some others engaged in sexually suggestive activities, and when it
appeared in an exhibit at the Whitney Museum the following year,
businessmen in the Brooklyn neighborhood considered suing the artist
for defamation.
Remarkably, Bierds seamlessly knits together the
activities of the two figures toiling away an ocean apart, a scientist
laboring in Paris and an artist working in New York: “He will paint on
the flank of an acrobat / a gilded skin. She will stroke down the
test tube / a ticking wand.” Bierds celebrates the life-affirming
art of Cadmus filled with enjoyable and festive social gatherings while
she also honors the solitary scientific efforts by Curie for which she
will sacrifice her life. Bierds manages the smooth transition
between the two partly by repetition of the word “radiant” in each of
the poem’s four stanzas, and in the closing lines she ingeniously
merges the image of the continual splitting in nuclear fission and the
continuous cycle of life with that of acrobatic circus figures creating
a human pyramid, reminiscent of the revelers in Cadmus’s Coney Island painting, as they
circle a ring on horseback:
Radiant, their sudden shape, like
fission’s sudden
pyramid: one on the shoulders of
two, two
on the shoulders of four, four on
the eight
pumping, glistening haunches, and
the sixteen
polished hooves, mute in the
swirling dust.
The splitting in nuclear fission symbolically
represented by the multiples of two in this circus image appears
comparable to similar division already seen in the stanza form of
“Sunderance” or the intricately patterned pairing of lines witnessed in
“DNA.” In addition, the linking of stanzas by repetition of
“radiant” within this piece resembles the numerous instances of
recurring words, phrases, or images from poem to poem throughout First Hand, connecting the content
of the entire collection into a unified whole. One can imagine
the amusement Bierds brings to herself in the composition of these
poems and the organization of the volume as she seeks shrewd new ways
to complement content with presentation.
Indeed, “Redux,” the poem that begins the third part
of First Hand, serves as a
perfect example as it echoes the book’s opening poem, “Prologue,” which
readers have already encountered and learned it concerned the young
Galileo. Although more than forty pages apart and spaced twenty
poems from one another, the two works share incredible similarities in
organization and language. “Redux” speaks of Hans Spemann, who
won the Nobel Prize in 1935 for his work in experimental embryology,
including transplanting sections of new embryos. Despite
the gap of centuries between the two scientists, Galileo and Spemann
are viewed in similar fashion as each poem begins with corresponding
phrasing:
They darken. In the sky over
Florence,
the oblong clouds swell and
darken.
[“Prologue”]
They darken. In the ponds
and springs near Stuttgart,
the oblong newt eggs swell and darken
. . ..
[“Redux”]
In “Prologue” the hailstones Galileo will split are
deemed to be “as swollen as bird eggs.” In “Redux” the nest eggs
are depicted as “splitting, re-splitting, until, swollen to fullness .
. ..” In the second stanza of “Prologue,” the poet writes: “At
his back, his father is tuning violins . . ..” In the second
stanza of “Redux,” readers learn: “At his back, his newborn stirs in a
wicker pram.” By the third stanzas, “Galileo saws through a
captured hailstone / with a length of E-string,” while “Spemann saws
through a two-celled newt egg / with a length of the infant’s
hair.” Finally, the two pieces close with nearly parallel
language, although the difference is striking only in the wording or
individual emphasis, and the emotions both characters feel when
thwarted from full comprehension of their subjects seem almost
equivalent:
If only the
hand were faster,
and the blade sharper, and
firmer,
and without a hint of song . . .
[“Prologue”]
If only the hand
were surer
and the blade sharper, and firmer,
and without the glint of time . .
.
[“Redux”]
Two scientists centuries separated from one another
experience matching circumstances when they conduct experiments — one
as a young boy learning to love discovery and knowledge, the other as a
mature man displaying his continuing curiosity and questioning.
Likewise, the two personae in these poems come to a state of
frustration at their human limitations and an inevitable inability to
understand everything. These same human frailties and failings
restricting possibilities of complete knowledge about the world around
him appeared to be elements in Gregor Mendel’s sharing his scientific
perspective with a spiritual one that acknowledges God, and they may
have been contributing factors in Mendel’s need for faith, his
acceptance of mystery.
A poem titled “Epilogue: Tulips, Some Said” ends the
collection, and this piece serves admirably as a coda to the rest of
the volume. Its content suitably concludes the themes of connections
between art and science, of how a thirst for knowledge bridges the
lives of scientists and other individuals in differing eras, of the
inner tension and outer conflicts that may occur when one is confronted
by apparent contradictions in the framing of questions concerning
science and faith, as well as a number of other issues. Once
again, pairs of personae are placed in the poem as companions.
For instance, Bierds presents the sixteenth-century cartographer,
Abraham Ortelius, with his friend, Pieter Breughel the Elder.
Ortelius, whose desire for knowledge was so great he wished to map the
whole world, was one of Breughel’s patrons, as well as a close friend,
and he would memorialize Breughel in a 1570 obituary as “the most
perfect painter of his age.” Bierds reports their interaction:
“This is the world, Ortelius said, holding up to his friend, / Pieter
Breughel, a flattened, parchment, two-lobed heart. / And this, Breughel
answered, paint still damp / on his landscape of games, each with its
broad-backed child.” Each viewed the world through his own
perspective — one a man who used reason to map the physical outer
world, the other a man whose imagination charted the emotional inner
world.
This final poem delivers a satisfying closing note
for First Hand, both as a
written annotation and as a grace note. Nevertheless, another
piece immediately preceding “Epilogue: Tulips, Some Said” must be seen
as the book’s most ambitious and most effective summary work, one that
truly serves as the collection’s denouement. “Sonnet Crown for
Two Voices” consists of a series of seven sonnets strung together by
the interlocking mechanism of a crown pattern as the fourteenth line of
each sonnet doubles as the first line of the following sonnet, and the
opening line in the whole sequence repeats as the last line in the
final sonnet. Since the sonnets in this series are spoken by two
personae, the octet (voiced by Bierds) and the sestet (voiced by
Mendel) within each sonnet section are broken from one another by an
intervening asterisk centered between them.
The sections of the sonnets spoken by Bierds’s
persona relate a personal experience examining cellular structures
under a high-powered laboratory microscope. In the author’s note
for the book, Bierds reports the inspirational event and the wonderful
observations, guided by Steven Reynolds at the University of
Washington’s Department of Biology, which motivated her to choose this
subject:
. . . on a winter morning in
2004, with the help of poet
and biology student Jessica
Johnson, I observed, deep
within a living cell, the
spindle-shaped figure along which
chromosomes crawl during
mitosis. Later that morning
we went deeper, into the region
at the figure’s tip, a seemingly
magnetic pole where the spindle’s
thin, longitudinal fibers met.
To study that microcosmic world,
to map its geography,
Reynolds had infused the pole
with green fluorescent protein—
a green cloned from the body of a
jellyfish—and I watched,
at 1,200 times its size, the glow
of the cartographic life.
In the first sonnet of the sequence, Bierds decides
the fluorescent color she sees is as “green as early pea pods,” quickly
linking herself with Gregor Mendel — “a monk, in love with nature’s
symmetry” — and establishing a bond with that persona who speaks in the
second section of each sonnet. Moreover, because the fourteenth
line of each sonnet is repeated (or a close variation substituted) as
the first line of the next, Bierds and Mendel share parts of their
spoken words, which nearly appear to be dialogue as much as parallel
monologues, strengthening the sense of a connecting thread that extends
between them. Just as she has done in other poems, Bierds again
asks readers to see relationships between personae across time and
space, even when the ties that align one with another span centuries
and continents. In this crown of sonnets the time frames shift
from a morning in the winter of 2004 to “Midday, October, 1870.”
Bierds comments on the enlarged flecks of fluorescence she views
through the lens, keeping in mind the response Mendel might have shown
if given such a tool to view the microcosm made available by the
microscope in that university laboratory:
Like Mendel’s progeny, it blinks
across
the vines of probability, the
sap-glossed
spindle threads. How Gregor
would have swooned.
Throughout her persona’s portions of the seven
sonnets in the sequence, Bierds persistently presents allusions to the
particulars from content of those other poems in the volume preceding
this sonnet crown. Just as words, phrases, and images already
have recurred periodically in various poems, with this series of
sonnets Bierds cunningly seems to take delight in offering intricate
pieces that hold subtle, sometimes nearly hidden, references to many of
the book’s previous works. As in some of her earlier collections,
readers once again witness the precision and planning Bierds places not
only into the composition of each individual poem, but also in
preparing a volume whose poems are unified by themes and subjects, as
well as united by associations which join the poems together like beads
strung on a necklace. In this manner, Bierds displays both the
artistic vision she possesses as one of our best poets and the
methodical diligence or care for detail she shares with those fine
scientists she admires so highly. In the fifth sonnet of the
series, its first line echoing the words of Mendel, Bierds confides:
The scientist within me watched
the desk
withdraw, and then the scope’s
glass stage, and then
a pocked, nucleic wall, as down
we spun,
the shapes that held the shapes
all slipping back,
peripheral. And now, two
dye-cast
spindle poles appear, magnetic
discs that seem
to summon chromosomes, that seem
to bend
the stuff of us: east-southeast,
west-northwest.
With her participation in this incident and the
information she obtains, Bierds visits the “inscape of science” various
personae in her poetry had sought so frequently, and she realizes how
stunning the opportunity for such an occurrence would be for those
scientists she has studied, those seekers of knowledge she has
repeatedly brought to her readers. Especially in this volume,
Bierds recognizes how exceptional the moment is when she directs her
sight so intently into the light of “the scope’s glass stage,” and
again she thinks of the nineteenth-century monk who once in his dreams
was drawn to a light that “shimmers from gaps / where the works of the
mind are missing” (“Gregor Mendel and the Cats”). In the final
sonnet of the crown, perhaps remembering Gregor Mendel’s care of the
pea blossoms and contrasting Ortelius’s desire to chart the earth’s
expanse of seas and coastlines, Bierds contemplates “how Mendel would
have blossomed here. Reversed / astronomer, he’d chart these
inmost / lights of us: sky-shapes expressed through scrims / of
sea.”
During the author’s note, Bierds remarks upon her
own reaction when gazing down into the great magnification of the
laboratory microscope: “the light from this scope seemed sourceless,
unbidden, flawless, and infinitely precise, as indestructible in its
journey as I was not.” In “Counting: Gregor Mendel in the
Prelacy,” Mendel consciously notes the swift passage of time (and
readers may recall Bierds’s previous volume, The Seconds): “How the second hand
ticks!” However, in the sixth sonnet as Bierds stares first hand
at the “micro-Borealis” that glows under the microscope (perhaps now a
“reversed astronomer” herself), she also hears the movement of a
clock’s second hand, but the experience seems to have transported her
to a state of timelessness or a condition of no-time, as Robert Penn
Warren might label the effect when a moment seems suspended beyond the
control of real time: “Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Six inches from my hand, / the desk clock turns, but we’re outside of
time.” By the final lines of this sonnet, Bierds records: “From
jellyfish, my friend / has spliced genes for green fluorescence.
They find / expression here,
he says. As do we, firsthand.”
Of course, the “expression” alluded to by the
geneticist references the appearance in a phenotype of characteristics
attributed to a particular gene. However, the expression Bierds finds
firsthand is that of an artist, the poet conveying emotion in the
carefully chosen words or phrases of her graceful and lyrical
language. Indeed, when Bierds suggests in the seventh sonnet that
“Mendel would have blossomed here,” she may be comparing him to the pea
blossoms for which he cared, but additionally she may be making
reference to the reaction the monk would have displayed if given the
opportunity to view the shapes within cells through the powerful
microscope. However, in First Hand
Bierds successfully introduces Gregor Mendel to her readers, and
throughout her group of poems in which he appears as a persona, Mendel
also does blossom into a sympathetic character.
Certainly, when one at first enters into poems with
Bierds’s portraits of famous figures, the reader might not be faulted
for an initial resistance, an inability to fully accept that so many
noted personalities possessed such a profound and poetic voice.
This reaction may approximate the opening appearance in a film or on
stage of a familiar actor suddenly seen portraying an eminent
historical figure. However, just as an actor’s personal identity
fades from audience members’ minds, almost as quickly as the theater
house lights dim, and moviegoers or theater patrons gradually believe
in the assumed persona, perhaps actually empathize with the character
depicted in the movie or play, Bierds’s skill as a poet eventually
engenders a necessary suspension of disbelief. The willingness of
many readers to suspend disbelief and to receive, possibly even
embrace, the poetic voices of the personae in Bierds’s work may be
reached as a benefit of her repeatedly returning to this technical
device in poem after poem, volume after volume, and especially when a
remarkable persona recurs in the poetry. Frequent readers of
Bierds’s poetry become comfortable with her reliably revealing and
rewarding voice, particularly the resonance in its pitch as it evokes
images or emotions through language that is reasoned and ardent,
informational and emotive.
The presence of Bierds as a persona in this crown of
sonnets, offering her personal observations and contemplation within
the poems’ lines, almost palpably alters readers’ expectations and
adjusts the tone readers hear in the poetry. Along with the sense
of immediacy brought by Bierds as she presents firsthand testimony in
this sequence, readers encounter an engaging personality, someone
genuinely intrigued by the findings uncovered when peering at the
magnified items examined within the microscope’s optical field.
With its lyrical language and detailed descriptions, Linda Bierds’s
poetry performs in such a way as to illuminate and magnify. She
proffers a pair of approaches to rendering experience — the objective
expression evident in a scientific instrument’s record of measurements
and the subjective expression heard in the measures of a musical
instrument. Through her ability to appreciate and analyze
significant historical occasions, often concentrating on scientific
events or inventors, yet explain or interpret them through her highly
charged phraseology, as well as an exact and exacting vocabulary,
Bierds succeeds in blending science with art, merging a propensity for
intellectual organization and systematic categorization with an
instinct for more emotional impression or imaginative
representation.
Similarly, by the time Bierds writes the final line
in “Sonnet Crown for Two Voices” (words here spoken by the Gregor
Mendel persona; however, as the form demands, echoing the sequence’s
opening line spoken by the Bierds persona), readers recognize the
poet’s obvious empathy for that nineteenth-century monk who faced the
prospect of weighing deeply held faith and innovative factual
experimentation, even as some considered his work heretical.
Bierds had begun the crown of sonnets with an exclamation of excitement
at what she had seen through the microscope’s lens: “The glow.
How can I express it? My god / it lifts from protein flecks, up
and across / the crafted lens.” However, when Mendel utters a
similar statement in the series’ last lines, the language shifts toward
a more spiritual question in which the monk seems to be speaking of his
faith in a direct address to God. Mendel reacts to the afterglow
of glass shattered by external forces of nature, what some would claim
an act of God: “I saw, through sudden hail, a helixed axis /
glint. And then the two-coned mass: cyclone.” When the wild
weather’s swirling air currents smash through his windowpane, Mendel
feels as if he is “released — again — to love the world.”
Consequently, the final sestet of the sonnet
sequence, spoken by the Gregor Mendel persona, displays a slight change
in wording and emphasis from the lines originally voiced by Bierds’s
persona, but also hints at a shift in Mendel’s perspective as well:
Silence, then through the frost
of shattered glass
an afterglow arose—or
pressed—fully formed
but borderless. As I will
be, the swirling world
subtracted from the I of me:
wind, chalice,
heartbeat, hand . . .
Weightless, measureless, but beautiful,
the glow. How can I express
it, my God?
At the start of this crown of sonnets the poet
journeys from her world of language and subjective impressions into the
physical precision of the science laboratory. Her reaction is one
of amazement: “how can I express it? My God.” By the end of the
series of sonnets, the scientist journeys toward an atmosphere of
subjective expression, freed momentarily from the need to measure
precisely the subjects he observes. His response, even in the
form of a question, is an apparent reaffirmation of faith, a belief in
God: “How can I express it, my God?” Both figures find themselves
seemingly unable to reach the right language to describe their
emotions. However, as Bierds proves through the poetry in this
volume, as well as her other collections, the answer to the sequence’s
final question has already been intimated. The book’s poetic
language and artistic approach to viewing the world and its mysteries
provide one with wonderful ways for the expression of awe or amazement
shared by the personae of Bierds and Mendel, as well as the assortment
of other appealing personages with whom readers have become acquainted
through the poems within the pages of First
Hand and Linda Bierds’s earlier volumes.
Relating to readers the sculptor’s task of infusing
a life, even a spirit, into stone, or more metaphorically the
sculptor’s duty to free the stone of its hard and solid characteristics
by enabling shapes resembling the movement of flight (“To stroke from
stone the hovering bee — / to release from marble its white thorax . .
.”), Bierds devotes a poem, “Stroke,” in the center of First Hand to Gianlorenzo Bernini,
the seventeenth-century artist who created the Baroque style of
sculpture and “carved bees for the Pope’s shield, for the churches, /
and Roman fountains.” Bernini’s work is often noted for its
delicate effects, especially the way dolphins rise out of water or
angels float on clouds. As readers have seen elsewhere with other
personae represented in her poetry, Bierds depicts the sculptor in his
last days, up to the time death strikes at the age of eighty-one while
he is still hard at work, as “two days from his death, shapes would
climb / through his right arm, through the long wick of his nerves”;
however, Bernini’s significance lies largely in the manner he created
animated figures in his art — bees, dolphins, angels, etc. Like
Bierds in her poetry, Bernini also would produce portraits, busts
portraying characteristics of the subjects through particular poses
disclosing personality traits. In addition, as Bierds suggests, a
connection between art and science — in this case, between sculpture
and mathematics — or emotion and reason can be discerned over time:
“Hour by passing hour, / his room filled with stone chips and ciphers,
/ the metallic scent of mathematics.” Readers may perceive a
parallel between Bernini and Bierds, principally in their process of
revelation. As Bierds writes of Bernini: “To curry from stone the
texture of silk, or feathers, / or the fluid parchment of bee wings,
the hand / must pursue the source.”
Consistently in this collection of poems, as well as
in her other books, Bierds has sought to “pursue the source,” to take
readers to diverse times and places, always introducing interesting and
informative situations. Her portraits have caught remarkable and
influential men or women in significantly representative moments, even
though (perhaps, especially because) the specifics in the poetry may
mix factual information with imaginative action or be heightened by
creative and connotative details. Her poems also have sought the
sources of inspiration and imagination within individuals.
As a result, Bierds has brought the past to life in
the present, along the way displaying relevance of historical
happenings to contemporary concerns. In First Hand, the course of events
and litany of individuals travel through nearly twenty-five centuries,
from basic scientific inventiveness to the complex discoveries of
biochemistry and genetic cloning. Bierds’s poetry also evinces
both the contradictory and the complementary relationships between
science and theology, each with its own yearnings for answers to
mysteries, as she bridges the apparent space sometimes separating
desires for knowledge and feelings of faith. With her knack for
uniting divergent interests, she also has exhibited how her curiosity
about the process of scientific inquiry and her proficiency in the
composition of innovative poetry possibly might be brought together to
great effects — an intent understanding arising from different
perspectives and an inevitable insight with potential to increases
one’s wisdom.
As her lyrical language in First Hand occasionally overlaps
technical procedure, and the poetic process sometimes mimics scientific
concepts, these poems combine normally divergent strategies of
apprehension in order to exceed the limitations intrinsic to each one
alone. Linda Bierds’s poetic experiments in historical
portraiture smoothly, almost seamlessly, mix music and memory or art
and artifact, producing a highly distinctive poetry — unrestricted in
its use of time and space — that usually proves decidedly rewarding by
extending the cognitive grasp of her readers while also showing a
tender compassion toward the subjects of her studies.
Upon a preliminary firsthand perusal of Bierds’s
poems, new readers of her poetry might be surprised by the scope of
informative details contained within her work. However, upon
further reflection, these same readers may be astonished by the more
subtle emotional, nearly spiritual, resonance her elaborately conceived
book of poetry sustains in one piece after another, and how individual
poems — like the unique people and distinctive places they call to mind
(sometimes despite vast chronological or geographical distance) — may
endure, remaining as examples of persistently impressive poetry.
More importantly, these delightful poems should linger, long after
one’s initial reading, and they ought to be viewed very favorably
alongside similar treasures uncovered in Linda Bierds’s previous
volumes over the last two decades which also have served as
illuminating sources of learning or even original gifts of
inspiration.
Bierds, Linda. First Hand.
New York, NY: Putnam, 2005. ISBN: 0-399-15261-X
$25.00
