A Two-part Invention

by ElizabethGarrett (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1998

  $10.06

  The informing spirit of Garrett's second collection is music -- in the cadences of the language, the forms and resolutions of the poems. For her, a memorable poem is a kind of two-part invention, an interplay of the reader's imagination and the poet's intention. As in Bach's deceptively simple studies of that name, when the two discrete melodic lines of reader's and poet's imagination run parallel, polyphony is suggested. Garrett's poetry often recalls the early metaphysical poets, especially Donne, and, indeed, scattered through her work one finds the telltale word-signs: compass, envoi, Pythagorean, cosmos, a lover's pact, cipher -- Love, believe; for this is a two-part invention, /Your hand in mine, blindfold, against the gathering/Dark.