The Danger Is Seduction

Reality-based yet meditative, immediately appealing surfaces reveal surprising depths in "The Danger is Seduction" work like a kaleidoscope. Time passes. Locales change. Faces come and go. The familiar becomes strange. Strange things become familiar. But constants evolve: a search for understanding, the balm of sympathy, a subversive humor. Pat Sharpe takes us with her as she ranges the world, seeking adventure and insight from Thimpu to Timbuktu, from Darjeeling to Moscow to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In this collection she introduces potters, tea pickers, lamas, a Mexican maid with a wrenching decision to make, elusive mothers and lovers, scuba divers, demon-chasing dogs, neighbors seeking a harmonious way to co-exist. She has us riding ferris wheels, flying over Las Vegas, trekking in the rain, selling haunted old furniture, scuffing through dry leaves, sitting in meditation halls, encountering tsunami damage and, always - a unifying theme - seeking with her a home in the world, a place that satisfies intellectually and emotionally as well as physically. These are layered poems, deep poems, lyrical poems, but they start from where we are and Sharpe has an uncanny ability to speak to us vividly in our own idiom. There is mystery here, but no mystification. There is clear-sighted realism here but its companion is compassion.