Poetry. The luminous poems in Karen McPherson's SKEIN OF LIGHT pull and gather toward horizons of reflection. In language that repeatedly reveals what it can and cannot do, the poet maps landscapes of memory where sharp-edged questions disturb the stillness. The personal and human are deftly threaded through a natural world made legible in flights of birds, bending grasses, rock striations. And through this open work, the reader steps into a place both familiar and unknown.
"'In everything / there is an underside, an other hand, / something to which we are not listening,' writes Karen McPherson and whether the poet is writing of dreamscape or landscape, McPherson's gorgeous meditative poems dwell in the shifting meanings of that listening. From every angle, present or past, we see how wonderfully tricky yet compelling seeing or understanding or representing anything is, how transient words are when it comes to translating the momentary they try to name. Though, of course, in the joy of that 'perpetual translation,' McPherson would have it no other way, and as her readers, we, too, can be grateful for the endlessly exquisite possibilities these poems embody."—Maxine Scates
"Even in the play or pique of questions, McPherson's fierce eye has a relentless focus on the resonant image, her ear on the alluring rhyme. Meanwhile, beneath these poems a clock ticks like a metronome to guide us toward a kind of balance where we might, momentarily, rest and draw strength. Powerful work."—John C. Morrison