The Luxury of Obstacles (The Ragged Sky Poetry Series)

These poems delight with their precise gift of the real and observable world. Food smells as it cooks, apple trees suggest their own history, jellyfish look like old dimpled glass. And beneath the keenly observed surfaces of things is the underlying world of ideas, and of feelings set off by the tripwires that the natural world lays in the path of the observant poet. There are forays, too, into a more imaginary realm, one where Adam's creation of language goes beyond the naming of the animals, where cloistered nuns resemble whales, and where the Dalai Lama visits Hadrian's Wall. These are not obscure poems, but they may challenge readers to reflections-reflections as startling as the sudden glimpse of unrecognition we experience when we spot ourselves in a dark window or an unexpected mirror. "Elizabeth Danson's poems live in detail. They note with witty affection 'the owl's head turning/further than it should be able to,' a wasp choosing a clean spot on a plate to settle, the 'plip' of a small frog hitting the water. They know that gulls stand on one leg to conserve body heat and that you should take 'almond for colic, cardamom for sweet breath.' They like to muse on the 'scribble' of landscapes and lives, delighting sometimes in their legibility, often in their mystery. As much magician as naturalist, Danson transforms what looks like solitude into something populous and even intimate: yew berries are 'sealing wax on sinister dispatches,' dawn is the suddenly close flush of a dancer's cheek, and even owl pellets can become 'dreams/filled with remnants of the day before.' With her precision of tone and tune she crafts poems that are at once wry and fond, sensuous and restrained, luxurious and clear." -James Richardson, author of Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms