Summons

In her fourth book of poems, Deborah Tall serves up, as Charles Simic remarks, a huge feast of words and images. Spare, charged, eloquently complex, her poems distill emotion to its precipitate. In Cottage by the Beach, Normandy, loneliness is this: A dozen tulips/ erect in the centerpiece, / hold their allotment of empty air. In Winter Solstice, war yields, A hillside of markers, /a showroom of tombs./The bushes fruited with ice.Summons is a call to speak out -- in the face of violence, cruelty, and loss -- and a summoning up of the forces of nature and humanity that console.