Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2014

For over four decades, Gregerson (The Selvage) has with compassion and intellect composed poems that wend through mythology, science, family narratives, and current events. Yet this volume is notable more for cohesion than change. Gregerson’s signature stepped lines call to mind the tercets of later W.C. Williams, but they are unmistakably her own. Uneven line lengths are steadied by immaculate prosody and consistent stanza structures; frequent pivots from line to line mete out progressions in thought as the poems travel down and across the page. Gregerson could be writing of her own lyric sensibility when she describes Athena and Arachne, who “with their earth-bread, grass-/ fed, kettle-dyed// wools, devised on their looms/ transitions so subtle no/ hand could trace nor eye discern/ their increments// yet the stories they told were perfectly clear.” A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy. Reading her work collected in this fashion, it becomes clear that a salient element of her poetics is the enduring commitment to thinking through suffering in its myriad forms and sources. Gregerson’s poems remind the reader “not unkindly, See,/ the world you have to live in is// the world that you have made.” [em](Sept.) [/em]