Black Series: Poems

In her remarkable Black Series, Laurie Sheck turns the ordinary world inside out and shows us its glittering seams. Her long, elegantly quizzical lines convey a haunted vision of human striving which is in part an elaboration on our daily reality, and in part a fantastic departure from it. "I can almost taste the glassy air," she writes. "Where are the birds in it, / wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright / chaos of atomized instances . . . ?" Roaming freely in the shifting landscape of the imagination, Sheck delivers an inner life that is just as vivid as what we see around us; at the same time, she shows us what we see in a new light, bringing illumination even to darkness:

It's the black night that wakes in me,
so dominant, so focused.
And then a car goes by and I think,
"I'm in the world,"
tires kicking up gravel from the dust.
What does the orange hawkweed do
inside this dark-its radiance
secretive but not extinguished?

To read this collection is to discover at every turn that secretive but undeniable radiance, and a language that is both riveting and distinctive.