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More Reviews
Review of Thawed Stars in the
Spring/Summer 2000 issue of The
Book Reader:
"What we cannot do is our evolution; what we cannot be
is our true destiny. Alice Pero's superb poems link us with the
glorious unknown whose lessons are more vivid than our
knowledge.
"I sit in your smile and/the walls fall down/We find
reasons for tangents/ and digressions/into flying tapestries and/woven
trapezes/The riddle of my last frown dissolved."
Pero is a veteran poet whose delineations of her poems into
sections--New Music, Breathless Love, The Evidence, These Birches--only
faintly suggest the poems' rich unifications.
"I lie/in acres of skin/and you do not even/wonder
why/or consider whether/escape is possible."
Humor, wit, the majesty of mystery. A poem dedicated to The
New Yorker tells what she will write,
but:
"I will never mention/the one night I spent/all
alone/hugging the moon."
Icons come crashing down in her vivid eyes, and a whimsy sets
in:
"After the break of dawn/I stepped in the pieces/all
day."
Lovely absences all day bring room for thought, awe:
"I dropped in to see you/and felt beautiful/and
invisible/I held the world/ in my arms, green and captive,/while you
whistled/and tap danced/and wondered what that/breeze was."
Her title poem, "Thawed Stars", is a wonderfully absurd delight about
the modern world:
"I've dipped scores and scores of my stars/in black
paint so as not to offend/We must placate placate/ A world of men
wearing sunglasses/But beware of thawed stars/They drip."
Is our true heritage in the sides of things? In their glimmering
tops?
"I'll be coming back in late March/when there is a point of
remembrance/the crocus proving itself/against the snow."
The romance of discovery, the radiant brilliance, the surprise and
laughter are all here in Alice Pero's deeply intelligent insights into
the edge of things."
The Book Reader,
America's Most Independent Review of Books
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