Alison Hawthorne Deming brings to her first collection of verse the kinds of scrupulous observation and clear-eyed analysis that characterize scientific inquiry as well as a poet's eye for the telling moment. Science and Other Poems establishes astonishing parallels between the mute, inexorable processes of the physical universe and the dark mysteries of the human heart, parallels so clearly wrought and convincing that we wonder why we had not recognized them before.
"Caffe Trieste" lays bare the unexamined terror and sorrow that underlie the proliferation of faux fifties kitsch, then strips the veil of specious grace from the decade and reveals it as it was for those who lived it.
In the chilling "Alliance, Ohio," a mother and daughter suddenly find themselves stranded in a world of predators, a poisonous world charged with sexual threat, where every smile, every gesture, drips with sly menace.
Yet moments of dislocation can also be cause for rejoicing, as when a speaker, after surprising a bat in the house, is moved to rapture by the sight of the night sky. Every page of Science and Other Poems is alive with startling juxtapositions, eerie parallels, abrupt shifts of tone, and image after image of crystalline perfection - as in this dazzling evocation of soft-shelled crabs: "their finely stippled bodies that give to the touch, / translucent as Japanese lanterns."
These poems imbue everything, from the microscopic to the stellar, with wonder. Each instant of illumination, like poetry itself,brings the world alive with "a faithfulness deeper than seeing."
Editorial Reviews
"Yes, the Hawthorne—Nathaniel—is ancestor to the poet, as well as the subject of one of the finer poems in the 1993 winner of the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award. Deming's work is deeply based in her New England life and landscape with its omnipresent ocean, beaching whales, and dense history. But it transcends regionalism in its political awareness. Deming has an unusual ability to spin autobiography together with its social context to create strong, moving poems. In the title poem, for instance, a science fair draws entries from children according to both their life experiences and their innate optimism; in the long "Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne," the poet's life twines around family memories of the great author and expands to include the land and its current inhabitants. A fine, refined first book." —Pat Monaghan, Booklist
About the Author
Alison Hawthorne Deming is director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, and the author of Temporary Homelands, a collection of nature essays. She has received many fellowships and awards and has published her poems in such magazines as Crazyhorse, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
