Magnetic North

By Linda Gregerson

Book Overview

The New Yorker has written, "Gregerson's rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically." In this new volume, Linda Gregerson makes clearer than ever her passionate premise that the metaphysical only and always derives from our profound embeddedness in physical reality.

From subjects as diverse as the Nazi occupation of Poland and a breakthrough discovery in cell biology, Gregerson seeks to distill "the shape of the question," the tenuous connection between knowing and suffering, between the brightness of the body and the shadows of the mind. "Choose any angle you like," she writes, "The world is split in two." One poem, "Bicameral," moves from a child's cleft palate to a gunshot wound to the hanging skeins of a fabric in a postwar art exhibit. In the wool cut from the sheep to make the materials of art, she finds a tangled record of violence and repair: "The body it becomes will ever / bind it to the human and a trail of woe."

Longtime readers of Gregerson's poetry will be facinated by her departure from the supple tercets in which she has worked for nearly twenty years: Magnetic North is a bold anthology of formal experiments. It is also a heartening act of sustained attention from one of our most mindful poets.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B003K0RI8O
• ISBN13: 9780547085760
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

The Elegance of Complexity

Psychologists and media theorists, who study visual perception, speak of a phenomenon called perceptual completion. This occurs when our brain fills in the missing information in a given image (think "connect the dots"). Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson, is a study of the intellectual cognate to this theory. Gregerson's scholarly voice juxtaposes dissimilar thoughts and draws us, self-consciously, into this, often taken for granted, process of completion. Her speakers pull us out of conversation, observation, the poem itself and, most importantly, any desire to oversimplify. Her verse is learned, though not in an archaic or stilted sense. She reaches into her intellectual well when it's both economical and sonorous. There's nothing puffy or pretentious about it. Neither is she a romantic poet of everyday language. But then, it's the wisdom of the everyday, not just the absolutes of science, that she finds so troubling. In "Sweet," a mother chides that civilization cannot go on this way, as long as "we/ have so much/ and the other people so little"(1). The reaction to this is a callous and cynical "Sweet"(1). But this assault, on an endearing if naive world view, comes from a separate voice in the poem. Life is not "sweet," nor should our attitude towards it be contemptuous. Both of these pathologies, according to the Magnetic North, discard all the beautiful complexity around us. Her tone is objective, and her language impressive--but she will not let it control the conversation. If nothing else, this is poetry of internal conversation: the conversations in us, within those around us, and throughout history. Specifically, "Dido in Darkness" appears to be a dialogue between voices of uncertain origin. They could be two different people, or two sides of an internal monologue. One voice describes, in a casual way, the makeshift play it saw, while the other, on the opposite but overlapping half of the page, delves deeper: ...and then they were nearly stymied. *Until? Till someone brought the pitcher in... A temporal trespass? *A temporal trespass de- *liberate because we're most *convinced by that which most *requires our help.(58) (*lines set to the right, and below, preceding unmarked lines) When we can't see the wires or the stage hands, we are separated from the performance. The interaction she witnesses makes the play real. Its complexity is revealed through a like complexity in this poem. It challenges us to determine the source of the dialogue, and questions our ability to understand the poem as a result. The poem "De Magnete," tellingly located in the center of this work, speaks of the historical attempts to locate the magnetic north pole, and reveals Gregerson's ability to blend the scientific and the poetic. She describes Edmund Halley's study of the magnetic north: His ship was called the Paramore (two years at sea), his blazon to the body of the loved one was a Map, the first, of Deviation. Naile