Crocus
This book can be opened with
Whether
Aligned with the mechanism
whereby the spirit is borne aloft
through song comes again
the question: whether. And not soothed
so much as opened by the boy
soprano’s Sanctus, what moves
in the mind as the throat constricts
in sympathy, one note peeled
from the last, fine as paper slipped
from a garlic bulb, veined,
translucent, is whether—as if
wound through the spiraling
amplitude, purpled, fretted,
one voice suspended
in concentration of prayer or terror
wills itself above faltering,
more perfect since time must
soon break it. And made it.
Whether and by whatever impossible
arrangement of stars, harmonies,
correspondences through which
the music finds the spirit and like
a blade slits and releases,
circulates the question
through the phrase, the delicate
engine—as if it matters: the song
rises, everything goes with it.
The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and
memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.
British writer Virginia Woolf wrote about the pleasures of having a room of one's own. Here, Vermont poet Karin Gottshall shows us her own sort of private place.---—Tracy Press
Crocus is not leadenly preoccupied with things; rather, its desire is to open again and again to the world.---—Mid-American Review