Haunting and spare, The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind is obsessed with fate’s fickle nature. Propelled by internal rhyme, these lyric poems draw on fairy tales and fables, stories from the Bible and from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, their characters blown hither and thither by mythic winds–but -inevitably, toward an awareness of mortality.

Inside the Dog-Fish

Wide as the church, the sea, the cavern,
hard as a rock, a tree, a geyser, tight as the spot of birth, hot as the furnace,
serpent, witch, plain as the ego, primitive,
tomb, loose as a swallow’s whirling torso,
fiery vertebra–madre terribile, mother of agony, atony, urge, providing a passage,
a sabbath, excuse, symbol of charm gone darkly sour, emotional windbag pricked by the light of the luna cornuta,
spitting up trinkets and bottles of rum,
and pages of books, and chunks of men.

Mark Strand describes Edward Hopper’s work as being informed by two imperatives, one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us to stay. Such is the experience of reading The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind, Larissa Szporluk’s demanding and brilliant new book: we are both urged -forward and held back by its mysterious intellection. -Szporluk’s work is about meaning: what can be known and what cannot be, what can be divulged and what must be withheld. The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind is fraught with such taut pleasures. This is poetry both luscious and rigorous.–Lynn Emanuel