cover image Cities of Memory

Cities of Memory

Ellen Hinsey. Yale University Press, $18 (84pp) ISBN 978-0-300-06673-9

Hinsey, the winner of the 1995 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition (for the best first collection by an author under the age of 40), is a Massachusetts native who lives in Paris. A transcultural perspective--that of a sensitive, knowledgeable outsider--informs her work, which, with deft, understated lyricism, draws on European history and art. Her form is naturally elegant, favoring loosely syllabic lines and stanzas like couplets and quatrains. Though her tone is mature and distanced, her observations can be starkly intimate: in an evocation of Beethoven's death in ""March 26, 1827,"" stylish Austrian mourners give way to an acknowledgment that music itself felt the loss: ""it was sound/ that wept."" Hinsey's scope of the continent is remarkable, encompassing chilling wartime poems that employ the literal landscape (""The Approach of War""), recent political events like the construction of the Berlin Wall and a knowledge of European painting. Within this latter group, trees by Van Gogh are ""querulous as archaic speech,"" and the aesthetic, visionary process quietly explored (""a palette like a landscape/ can grow too small...""). This collection has a shimmering, timeless quality that apprehends the visitor's idea of Europe--its mirage on the horizon. (June)