Albedo (The New, 61)

Albedo (The New, 61)

Poetry. A collection of tricksters from Anton Mesmer to the inexplicable gods of Ovid; fairy-tale characters and figures from memory; the white blanket of snow in the far north across which a small plane flies: these recurrent images haunt and populate Jesme's ALBEDO. "A small abyss becomes / larger with use," she writes, yet in examining the mostly ordinary and sometimes extraordinary ways in which the individual comes to perceive and love the world, Jesme acknowledges a landscape of "dormancy for the duration" with poems that confront multiple mournings.<br /><br />"Poetry's truest measure is not language but time, and our best poetry reveals its trust in the paradox of its wordless foundation. 'Time does not enter it/ or does,' Kathleen Jesme writes, 'but in a slant way because/ words are history/ and hoax.' ALBEDO derives its considerable power from what it knows to be hoax and homestead at once, and time dwells in the book as sequence, as series, and as discrete lyric, its totality poignantly multiple in a measure made sacred by faith. A liturgical calendar counted out in weeks of weather and grief, trees and seasons, deaths and animals, this is a devotional book of hours bound in snow, a missal for those for whom 'god is organic/and arrives from the inside.'"—Brian Teare