The Happiness Experiment (The New Series, 18)

Poetry. Fishman's work marries Wordsworthian country life to modern complexity in lyrics celebrating love, joy, birth, and wonder. "These lyrics carry the reader into a realm of immense, immediate, and surreal activity. THE HAPPINESS EXPERIMENT is a dream-version of what Whitman might have called a 'song of occupations.' Within Fishman's moving work of observation and recollection, the world of ordinary things seems itself to think, to mind itself; things gather, watch, prepare, betray, forget, explore, give names or keep silent. Throughout, the poet's mercurial intelligence is alert to the play of echo and the surprises of memory, in which the simplest verbs reveal their capacity to haunt. Her book's experiment is always linked to experience, its happiness to hap or chance"--Kenneth Gross.