In this, her latest, deeply moving collection, Kelly Cherry confronts the basic questions of love and death, faith and suffering. From her search for “a new poetry”—one that can face up to the worst barbarities of the twentieth century—Cherry wrests a passionate, authoritative, powerful vision that is itself transfiguring.
Death and Transfiguration
focuses on the wisdom one gains from pain rather than on the pain itself. Cherry, betraying no fear, grasps her anguish to see how much she can stand.
Dedication, tenacity, and spiritual poise are needed to make precise observations of this kind in the most trying times. In
Death and Transfiguration,
Cherry demonstrates how such displacements of the mind carry with them their own analeptic.
“Requiem,” the collection’s long closing poem, gathers all of these deaths in a single embrace. This spectacular piece, emotionally akin to Anna Akhmatova’s poem of the same title but as closely and brilliantly reasoned as philosophy, transforms everything that has gone before, creating a strong, unified work.