Irons in the Fire

This "praise piece to molten metal--duplicitous, artful and harrowing--and to its handlers" is Nor Hall's prose "character sketch" of iron and iron workers--"the people who work iron and can't keep their hands off it." These are strangely passionate people with a "compulsion to adore that binds them in an essential community of iron men and ferrous women." Offering a brief history, mythology, and psychology of the element iron--both alchemical and industrial--Irons in the Fire is itself a passionate, inherently erotic contribution to elemental poetics. As a non-dogmatic psychology and phenomenology grounded at once in art, myth and direct experience, it brings both a personal and feminist intensity to a tradition that includes Gaston Bachelard, C.G. Jung, and James Hillman. "The End of the Iron Age" in Part Two is an extended poetic work, "one woman's love song & fear song: an epic ode to matters of a lifetime out of which iron's images extrude." Borrowing a structural principle from W.C. Williams' Paterson yet breaking ground in its own right, it takes the poetic impulse back to epic roots, speaking beyond literature as such, straight to the human psyche--"real & profound," Anne Waldman said of it, "'aroused by metal, '--there is always a woman in the fire "