Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit

Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit by Deborah Warren, recipient of the 2008 Richard Wilbur Award, is a collection of poems that are, as Rhina Espaillat notes, "out to capture the seen, the unseen peripherals, and the incalculable possibilities behind them." In each of these delicate yet unsentimental poems, Warren shows her mastery of a variety of forms and approaches, yet she always makes certain that her reader hears a discernibly human voice and the music of everyday speech at the center of each piece. "In poem after poem," Espaillat writes, "Warren's subjects are caught in a light that stops time -- or makes it race -- or breaks through the normal edges of the possible"; just as her poem "The Glassblower" does: "He should have stopped before the music, cooling, / hardened; he should have held the bright balloon / tremolo on the thin pipe where it hung / unfinished -- when there was nothing yet to shatter, / only possibility and prism...." In this and other remarkable poems like "The Rider," Warren explores the shifting boundaries between hope and an often painful reality, between action and intellect, and between that "edgeless wood dividing / thought and dream."