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From Stephen Elliott
Filmgoers this year who saw the documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D (or not) entered the prehistoric Chauvet caves of Southern France in a stunning modern way. The labor to return to the stone womb felt transformative but untranslatable.
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The collection’s last section, “The Two Thousandsies” (dedicated to Rachel Maddow), his “Garden of Eden” reminds us this Professor Emeritus poet has managed to sustain over decades a vision of the profane as sacred, which alone is worth the price of admission.
The collection works as poetic biography and Whitmanesque dialogue, and this approach and its repetitions become irresistibly hypnotic.
Perspective and introspection are plentiful in this fine retrospective collection, but Gallagher doesn’t fully see now. She speculates profoundly and eloquently, metaphysically — never astro/quantum physically, as if from any century — but our own.