With the skill of a dancer, she uses devices to dazzle and divert, so that the meaning, as it coheres onto the page, provides a surprise. In this new collection, Lockward sings primarily of mortality and loss, but often with wit and humor, and delightfully augmenting those devices, devices of sound and structure: sestinas, rhyming couplets or triplets, slant rhymes, patterns on the page. Not marking time-all the final remains of friarsįor beauty’s sake, six rooms on the Via Veneto, Muting the light, a chimeless clock of vertebraeįoot bones, and finger bones, its single hand Her memento mori, awareness of mortality, can even take turns into the fantastic, as in the breathtakingly beautiful poem “The Pull of Bones.” The poem situates itself in the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, where the bones of deceased monks have been nailed to the walls as ornament and reminder:ĭecorative motifs of triangles and circles,įrescoes, columns, and arches, and suspendedįrom ceilings, filigree of lacey bones, shades Lockward directly takes on life’s brevity and faces it squarely. Somehow, in exploring these dimensions of life, they manage to shimmer and awe. The poems cover the field of loss: shock, grieving, pain, and acceptance.

Whether her subject is nine renegade monkeys escaped from a testing lab, or the red dress (re-dress) of a child dreaming of freedom from abuse, this poetry takes “quick, sharp steps like flint against steel.” There is taut craft here, along with unfailing wit, and a pleasing defiance, even when defiance fails to change anything. Taking its texts from narratives of an undefended childhood and life’s many later assaults, Lockward’s poems consider the prospects of life’s improvement or worsening.

The Uneaten Carrots of Atonementby Diane Lockwardĭiane Lockward, author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop and founder of Terrapin Books, has written a book whose craft is searing in vivid colors, a poetry collection that seethes with subtle outrage and beautiful grief.

The Renaissance Club by Rachel Dacus