Reader’s Corner

I am constantly reading poetry, and yet it always seems I am barely scratching the surface of what is out there. So it goes. But there are always some that stand out. Among those I have read lately is Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North, published in 2007 (Houghton Mifflin) and a finalist for the National Book Award. I found Magnetic North a beautiful and fascinating collection of poems. Gregerson has a way of lifting history and science into the realm of the metaphysical, plumbing it for meaning and larger truths.

The back of the book reminds me that she has long worked in “supple tercets,” and that this book is a significant departure. Some poems are in tight little couplets, others sprawl across the page, and many do something in the middle. The wide-ranging forms add an exciting dynamism to the book, which is carried also by Gregerson’s mastery of muscular and expressive syntax. Among the poems not to miss in this collection is “De Magnete,” a poem in six parts that takes as its major source William Gilbert’s treatise On the Magnet. And, hands down, the final poem, titled “Elegant,” a reflection on the Nobel Prize­–winning research concerning “genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.” If that doesn’t yet sound “elegant” to you, consider these lines of Gregerson’s:

     Death
is not an afterthought nor

(mother of beauty) will death
undone assist us, we
are made of it, are cognate (mother) to the worm,
          a worthy

daily labor and this thread
of in-the-cells remembering make it so.

Magnetic North
By Linda Gregerson
Houghton Mifflin, 2007 (just $5.98 at Amazon)