Palimpsest

Poetry. "Families, nature, the body, artists as different as Romare Bearden and Irina Ratushinskaya: in the poems of PALIMPSEST, Maxine Silverman's imagination draws these diverse strands into a dense matrix of kinship. Remembered scenes and familiar actions are seen anew, in the insistent glow of 'a thousand most tender mercies' ('La Natividad'). The fleeting is made permanent, newly named with 'some sound that fills the clearing with light' ('Daybreak, the Doe, the Trees'). These are visionary poems of heart but also of spirit. Each is a reckoning with wonders concealed in plain view, and Silverman is a poet assured in her calling, who knows (as she says in 'Morning, Possum') that 'Today, / ... was given me for this and no more...'"