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F O R E W O R D Luisa A. Igloria frames the first poem in this lush, unexpected book with a quote from Epictetus: “. . . as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, / and another comes in its place.” The Stoic philosopher may offer this principle as a cause for detachment, but Igloria, I’d hazard , sees things differently: transience, if not exactly cause for celebration , is for her an occasion for the new to present itself. Her poems are drunk with the world’s bounty; they fill themselves with life: birds and flowers, Dürer’s engravings, tattooed mothers swimming at the Y, fruits whose flavors could hardly be more delicious than their names: carambola, grenadilla, maracuya. The solid ground on which her poems rest is love for the world in all its pungent variety. A goodly part of what I mean by love is close attention, a profound interest in and regard for what’s out there. Igloria’s poetry is a kind of tally, an accounting, a guide to the spectacle of the given, the strangeness and complexity of what surrounds us. Here, she seems to say to her readers , I’d like you to look here and here. But a poem’s evocation of reality—that is, a description—must be informed by both feeling and thinking. Human consciousness is a flow of perception, emotion, and ideas about what we think and feel, and a poem often serves as a kind of model of consciousness, inviting us into a version of the poet’s subjectivity. This is why poetry is perhaps the most intimate of the arts; it presents the possibility, albeit brief and to some degree illusory, of entering into another person’s skin. Any poem in this accomplished book might serve to illustrate this three-way marriage of perception, emotion and reflection. I’ll choose a lovely, characteristically Igloria poem, “Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting.” The poem is structured by couplets—perhaps to mimic the couple in the Van Eyck, and to underscore the speaker’s profound longing to be coupled, herself? The opening lines sketch a painterly landscape: Cream and magenta on asphalt, the blooms that ripened early on the dogwood now loosened by sudden rain— The scene immediately provokes a reflection, and not at all one we’d expect: Do you know why that couple touch hands in the Van Eyck painting? [x] These dashed blossoms have led, through subterranean associations that won’t become clear for a while, to Van Eyck’s famous painting, in which a newly married couple pose in their room, between them a convex mirror throwing their image-in-reverse back toward us. The speaker has an answer to her own question: Their decorum holds the house pillars up, plumps the cushions, velvets the drapes for commerce, theirs and the world’s. See how the mirror repeats and reflects them back to each other, though crowned by a rondel of suffering. In her green robe with its multitude of gathers, she casts a faint shadow on the bed. Suffering and shadow: the couple’s formal stance, their air of distance and dignity, are read here as a means of containing pain, all that’s wrong between them. Then comes a new sentence, one that begins as further description of the painting, but that quickly slides to something else: And the fruit on the window sill might be peach, might be pear, might be apple—something with glimmering skin, like the lover and the scar he wore like a badge to the side of his throat. The poem has moved elegantly, effortlessly toward its occasion, the disappointment in love that is fueling this examination of both art and landscape. And it is to the landscape of the opening couplet that the poem now turns: Fickle nature, cold and grainy as the day that spills its seed above the fields, indiscriminate, so things grow despite themselves. And there was the one who said never, but turned from you to rinse his hands. Spilled seed, what grows despite itself, the one who said never—there’s an oblique but nonetheless complete narration of a love affair here, one ending without fruition. And a sly shift has occurred. I read that first “you,” back in the poet’s question about the Van Eyck portrait, as posed to the reader, or to the world: do you know why? But the “you” in...

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