cover image Fermi Buffalo

Fermi Buffalo

Louise McNeill. University of Pittsburgh Press, $29.95 (91pp) ISBN 978-0-8229-3795-1

The late McNeill ( Hill Daughter ) was born in 1911 in rural West Virginia. Her writing career, which spanned 60 years, encompassed poetry and prose. The poems in this collection are composed in an impressive variety of metrical forms, and reflect both her Appalachian roots and technical mastery of rhythm and rhyme. The volume's first section is indebted to the vocabulary of theoretical physics. In the title poem, images of electrons racing through a nuclear accelerator and ghosts of vanished buffalo herds meet in the tragic vortex of American history. Like the metaphysical poets, McNeill spins dazzling metaphors out of scientific fact, as in ``Schroedinger Waves.'' The most moving poems belong to the book's final half, where time, memory and loss are viewed from the promontory of old age; the profound beauty and serene acceptance of mortality in these last works suggest that the poet was writing a coda to her own life. Though there are powerful echoes of Frost, Dickinson, Blake, and others in McNeill's poetry, it's original. (Aug.)