CHARM AND STRANGE

These lyrical poems inhabit a world of dreamscapes, enigmas, and the numinous.

In her second collection, following The Last Eclipsed Moon(2008), Casebeer brings together 51 poems, many previously published in literary magazines. The title poem refers to two types of a quark, a fundamental subatomic particle. In 1990, the year Robert Taylor won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on quarks, the speaker in this poem “had so little time to wonder / about the heart of anything,” consumed with “children and work / dogs and cats lilies and irises,” that she didn’t pay much attention to his achievement. Noting that the very term quarkscomes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, whose opening line starts in the middle of a sentence, the speaker suggests that literature has the greater claim to what’s fundamental, since a story—unlike matter—can begin anywhere. “Charm and strange” also encapsulate the book’s sense of forces that are, like the quark, elusive. Dreams and death, for example, figure in the opening piece, “Imagine the weight.” The speaker has anxiety dreams about time-pressured tasks she must perform, including some related to her (now dead) parents. They’re late in two senses, and in the slowness of living, she can’t catch up. The short, unpunctuated lines convey her breathlessness well. In all these poems, Casebeer’s craft is evident in the lines’ precision and economy. Similarly, in “Symbol,” the speaker’s fears for her husband and his “deathrattle / crisis” aren’t stated explicitly but are expressed instead by the disturbing image of shrikes, predator birds “that impale their prey / on thorns since they have no talons / only a songbird’s delicate feet.” Other poems engage with politics and social issues, but whatever the subject, the author goes devastatingly to the heart of things.

Powerful, well-wrought poems that consider mystery with discipline and nuance.