A Review of Gail Wronsky's Imperfect Pastorals

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Karen Kevorkian reviews poet Gail Wronsky's Imperfect Pastorals (What Books Press, 2017), a book comprised of pastorally-inclined poems that take their titles from Virgil’s Georgics. "Her poems banter with the large questions: Can we trust our senses? Is it our responsibility to bear witness? What will all our attention to phenomena get us, anyway?" More:

The persona of the poems is an obviously educated, hip, traveled woman of experience whose portion of despair is incompletely solaced by the world’s natural gobsmacking beauty. Urgent telling evokes emotion she dances away from. The voice is infused with a grand timbre that seems reflexively undercut as when confronting “[w]hatever it is that climbs out of the dark at daybreak in its thick fur gown and operatic helmet” (“If Once That Well Known Scent Comes Down the Wind”). There’s a polymorphous quality to the persona, constructed from the bric-a-brac of culture and phenomena, “always some selfhood stalking an object” (“New Treatments Made Things Worse”). In the poem “Alone, Rather Because Not Otherwise,” the self clarifies its awareness of a constructed nature while watching itself in a movie. “How did that // mouth kiss, I    wonder. How did that    ruined, magenta / hair beguile? In sepia, darling, // like all dreamed sex:    solitude and object-hood a-bountiful.”

If the persona is a large one, it’s because the stature of the foe — death — demands it...

Read on at LARB.