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“These are lyrics that briefly and beautifully change our view of the world. In this effort,
they do a quietly wild, beguilingly sudden work of making us rethink the ordinary before
we can help ourselves, followed by the unnerving next part that hits us consequentially—we live in this world they are describing, though we had thought that we understood it
perfectly well already. The best in these poems are their smallest moments, but once
encountered, smallness means nothing but inspired surprise, as they have the power to
alter us with unexpected ease. . . . The poems here, in sum, offer crisp language, language
that speaks to new views, felt and therefore inherently worthy ways of reporting, all made
forceful by strong and easy narrative guidance. The speaking of these poems throughout, even in their drama, is quiet, making everything that happens all the more unsettling as these ideas reach into us.”—Alberto Ríos
"British writer Virginia Woolf wrote about the pleasures of having a room of one's own. [In Crocus] Vermont poet Karin Gottshall shows us her own sort of private place."
—Ted Kooser Whether
Aligned with the mechanism
whereby the spirit is borne aloft
through song comes again
the question: whether. And not soothed
so much as opened by the boy
soprano’s Sanctus, what moves
in the mind as the throat constricts
in sympathy, one note peeled
from the last, fine as paper slipped
from a garlic bulb, veined,
translucent, is whether—as if
wound through the spiraling
amplitude, purpled, fretted,
one voice suspended
in concentration of prayer or terror
wills itself above faltering,
more perfect since time must
soon break it. And made it.
Whether and by whatever impossible
arrangement of stars, harmonies,
correspondences through which
the music finds the spirit and like
a blade slits and releases,
circulates the question
through the phrase, the delicate
engine—as if it matters: the song
rises, everything goes with it.
The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and
memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.
| KARIN GOTTSHALL was recently writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and in many other publications. She lives in Middlebury, Vermont. |
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