At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetryis the idea of the hingethe point of connection of openings and closings.Maggie Di... » 

At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetryis the idea of the hingethe point of connection of openings and closings.Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present bringing together pastand future dream and waking death and life. Formally exact rigorous andtough these poems accept no easy answers or equations. Dietz creates aworld alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange amusementpark horses named Virgil and Sisyphus squirrels hanging over tree brancheslike fish. By turns humorous and pained direct and mysterious elegiac andelegant the poems trace for us the journey and persistence of the spirittoward and through its perennial fallboth the season and the humancondition. Cumulatively the work moves toward a fragile transcendencesurrendering to difficulty splendor and strangeness. In PerennialFall distinct hardedged images create a haunting counterplay ofdistortion troubled insight or menace. The simultaneous clarity and shadow hasthe quality of a dream that can be neither forgotten nor settled. This is aspectacular debut and more than thata wonderful book.Robert Pinsky «