Circumference of Light

I’ve always enjoyed Bruce Noll’s poems, but the sweep of comes as a revelation. I’ve been used to seeing Noll transform into Walt Whitman, both in his performances and often in his poetry as well, but the Whitman influence is less pronounced here (though he makes an appearance late in the book), and the Emily Dickinson-inspired title of the volume signals a new kind of intensity and refraction in many of the poems. The subject matter remains very much Whitmanian, though, from naked bodies to decaying flesh, from brushing a wife’s hair to lacing a girl’s skates, from the muck of ponds to worm- and insect-rich toad shit. Each poem is a Dickinsonian “stairway of surprise” usually emerging from the always surprising and often humorous commonplace, though there’s room for the sublime as well, as poem after poem returns us to the cosmos, black holes, northern lights, gravitational waves. From four-line gems to more extended narratives, aging and death are our inevitable companions, and time and again we come upon a poem of near perfection, like ‘Week Moments,’ which will change forever how you think of a calendar. Ed Folsom, Editor, & the Whitman Series for the University of Iowa Press