Thinking Eye, The
Published on 1. January 2016
78 pages
978-1-60235-790-7 (ISBN)
Description
Jennifer Atkinson's The Thinking Eye, her fifth collection, looks at the syntax of our living, evolving world, paying close attention to the actual quartz and gnats, the goats and iced-over, onrushing rivers. The poems also look at the looking itself-how places and lives become "landscapes" and the ways the lenses of language, art, ecology, myth, and memory-enlarge and focus our seeing. If it's true, as Gaston Bachelard says, that whether a poet looks through a telescope or a microscope, [she] sees the same thing, then what Atkinson sees is an earth filled with violence and beauty, human malice and ten thousand separate moments of joy. Clearly in love with the earth and the (English) language-all those inter-dependent lives and forms-Atkinson pays attention to both with a Bishoppy eye, a Hopkinsy ear, and an ecopoet's conscience. Behind the book's sharp images and lush music creaks Chernobyl's rusty Ferris wheel.
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Jennifer Atkinson is the author of five collections of poetry-The Dogwood Tree, The Drowned City, Drift Ice, Canticle of the Night Path (New Measure Poetry Prize), and The Thinking Eye. Individual poems have appeared in various journals including Field, Image, Witness, New American Writing, and Cincinnati Review. She teaches in the English Department and the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia.
