Micrographia

Borrowing her title and her eye for minutiae from Robert Hooke's popular 1665 scientific study of the natural world through a microscope, Emily Wilson argues, in these taut lyrics, that 350 years later we are still often mystified by the natural world. Favoring long, blocky stanzas that are dense with assonance and consonance, Wilson proves that language, like Hooke's lens, unravels the ordinary, revealing a “raw garden” where there are “back-tracking collages/ of brambles” and a bridge where “[r]amparts ruck over the underside slips.” As in her remarkable debut, The Keep (2001), in this second book, Wilson evokes landscapes that are dense and lush and legible, composed of “beautiful forestations of made language.” She also eschews the narrowness of the personal pronoun “I” to privilege instead an unbound lyric eye: “So the eye has no end/ going on outside its compulsion.” Her poems emerge as structures of a delicate and determined vision that sees “the things that were forms/ unparceling themselves from their forms.” This encounter, both lavish and intense, means that each poem is a “[w]ild sweet locus” for the world to be seen anew. (Mar.)