by Joyce Peseroff
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Beyond Fear of the Maker

In Joyce Peseroff’s fourth collection of poetry, Eastern Mountain Time, mushrooms are imagined as flying saucers that have landed after a space-storm, a fallen leaf moved by wind is thought to be a wounded mouse, and certain lilacs are deemed “famously sad.” 

The imaginative leaps taken in Peseroff’s book are easy to run with; in fact they are well-calculated and mostly seamless.  However, her poems ask too much of the reader when Peseroff indulges in excessive description and over-extended similes.  Her speaker compares herself to a Monarch:

…the globe of rusty pink milkweed

essential nectar for a jade, transparent

chrysalis…

When Peseroff’s poems are not overly descriptive they are, more often than not, lacking in vibrancy.  The title poem of the collection is especially unexciting with the repetition of the line “then nothing.” 

Peseroff writes best about death and animals.  In “The Ridge” she questions death’s motives as if death were a being with intention:

…why does extinction need

to demonstrate variety, nuance, its grip

on arteries, the worthlessness of lungs?

Often though, her struggles with death and the “maker,” are reconciled in a sweet and calming fashion. She presents death not as a finality, but as a transformation, “…swift erratic heart, a humming- / bird about to meet the lily’s bliss.”  In “The Knock” she presents death as a normality, thereby depriving it of its assumed power or dominance.  Death is as regular as preparing a pot of stew. 

In “Killings,” one of her most successful poems, Peseroff’s speaker ponders whether or not she is capable of killing a chicken.  She believes she could and wonders what tool she would use.  She goes on to remember all the animals that she has killed in her lifetime.  She mentions a four-pound salmon that was the brightest thing she had killed.  The poem is provocative, turning death and killing into something bright and desirable. 

The poem “Natural Light” creates a sense of serenity beginning with its title.  The poem recreates an orchard scene that has been ravished by the mice that owls hunt and grow fat off of: 

…stars

unrolling like an opera score for owls,

crickets, and skinny, long-legged frogs.

 Though the poem can seem stark, it is peaceful and refined, a good example of one of Peseroff’s greatest strengths, the calm atmosphere her poems often create.

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