First Bird Sighting: "Perennial Fall"

Whilst perusing the poetry section in the public library, I stumbled across a group of thin-spined paperbacks with names like “Ruin”, “Floating City”, and “American Sublime”, each practically announcing their obscure contemporary authorship with smatterings of postmodern cover art and promotions from never-heard-of cohorts. Figuring these to be prime fodder for twenty-first century poetry reviews, I pulled a few from the shelf and, after confirming the post-2000 publication date, scanned a few poems for either that novel, soul altering image or the clichéd romantic couplet. What I found was “Perrenial Fall”, a refreshingly original collection of poems by editor and lecturer Maggie Dietz.
Her writing is sometimes a tease, shifting suddenly between the massive and timeless and the trite and popular, such as in “Colleen in Sonoma”: “The sun blooms clean. My face / framed bare against the ancient mountains…His tears fall like leaves…the strip malls glowed fluorescent as TVs.” The effect would be almost maddening if it didn’t seem so deliberate. Her coy and seemingly trivial poetic gestures, like TVs and sardines and cow shit, follow gorgeous and heart-wrenching flourishes, then gently give way to quiet and beautiful closure: “At night, the stars are like / sardines, white-silver, tight as fists.”
Her poems assume the shape of birds because they are anything but formulaic. More impressively, she never shies from her own imagination. She proudly weaves visions and dreams into a beast of surreal integrity – one that is not easily tracked, but leads the way to clearer skies.

Read page 19 of the Beloit Poetry Journal at www.bpj.org/PDF/V51N4.pdf for a good sample of her work.