Abstract

In Half/Mask, Roger Mitchell goes in search of the magic that remains when the world is stripped down to “an inhospitable beauty.” Many of these starkly lyrical poems explore the human and natural communities found on tundra and borrow freely from the great narrative and sculptural traditions of the Inuit and other rugged people who have learned to live intensely under challenging conditions. Whether in the High Arctic or in different places “where human life . . . has a loose fit,” Mitchell discovers a land rich in imagery and metaphor for describing experience at a fundamental level, out at the edge of what we can know: “Alone and far away, remote, a step / or two beyond human, real being.” An effort to understand and sympathetically inhabit the earth drives these poems, even in the barren isolation of their settings, and gives to Half/Mask its emotional resonance. At a time when other books of poetry merely chronicle experience to the point of trivialization, or (worse yet) fail even at that, Roger Mitchell offers in his resonant new collection the record of a quest; his book is personal in the best sense and above all—no other word will suffice—mythic. In Half/Mask, he is part naturalist, part polar explorer, part shaman, and always a poet of deep lyric gifts and an infallible ear. This is a masterful collection by a poet working at the height of his powers. —David Wojahn

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