Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing

In her tenth volume of poetry, Marianne Boruch displays a historical omnipresence, as she converses with Dickinson, envisions Turner painting, and empathizes with Arthur Conan Doyle. She looks unabashedly at the brutality of recent history, from drone warfare to the disaster in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Poems that turn her gaze towards childhood, nature, animals, and her own poetics are patches of light in the collection's chiaroscuro. From "Before and Every After": Eventually one dreams the real thing. The cave as it was, what we paid to straddle a skinny box-turned-seat down the middle, narrow boat made special for the state park, the wet, the tricky passing into rock and underground river. A single row of strangers faced front, each of us behind another close as dominoes to fall or we were angels lined up politely, pre-flight.