A Fine Dusting of Brightness

The title of this collection, A Fine Dusting of Brightness, also opens an extraordinary poem of literary description and exposition focused on Vermeer's painting The Cook. These poems embody ekphrasis even when the subject of the poem is not a visual work of art. Many of the poems consider loss--the failings of age or sickness--and death, yet vivid observations become surprisingly juxtaposed images and skillful irony. For example, in "Final Gift," as they dissect a loved one's corpse, the student doctors give a kind of immortality: "you will live / in their learning." In another poem, "Simple Fracture," a mother recalls a son's birth as he endures setting a broken bone--in both, the son is "holding me / tight against the pain." For other writers, bereavement and desolation seem opposed to life, but for Dorothy Brooks, they extend the range of colors in "this ordinary moment: This life."

--Carol Mahler