Larkin Hits the Road

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Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 07:30 PM
MARYROSE LARKIN & DONNA STONECIPHER

“Am a detective of tangents,” writes Maryrose Larkin in her new collection, The Book of Ocean ($12.95 i.e. Press). The tangents she discovers – in sound and meaning – make for lyrically inventive poems that awaken both mind and heart. Imagery of the natural world, science, and religion appears in language that is fragmented yet rich, and often richly musical – “I am oxygen sentence a mouthful of mercury / calcium invention of hollow and ocean.” The connection of human perception, of language, to world is a thread throughout – “eye opens the idea of sky,” she suggests in “Prime,” the first poem in the spare and graceful series “Book of Hours.” An acknowledge-ment of loss, too, gently colors the volume – “we are wholly absence swung” – though the poems continually convey engagement and embrace, a desire to “edge / even closer see / inside out.”