The Locality Principle

Poetry. Written in alternating sections of poetry and short prose pieces, THE LOCALITY PRINCIPLE is, on one level, a perceptive and often wryly humorous account of a traveler's confusion and dislocation. In London, a narrator, presumably the author, is living on a street named after a nonexistent park, next to a garden he can see from a window but has no access to--a garden tended by a bizarrely ineffectual group of men and women who could be gardeners or possibly inmates from a local asylum. But Waldrop's is role as a displaced observer also provides the opportunity for a series of reflections on deeper subjects, such as concept of the soul, and the fact of his own mortality. Overseeing it all is the unforgettable, impassive Pee-Paws, a resident cat that spends night after night staring into the blazing fireplace: "Her response to the fire, I come to realize, is more complete than mine...to her it is obviously a source of the most profound feelings, feelings I can only guess at...mystical feelings." It is those "mystical feelings" that indicate the terrain which the traveler in The Locality Principle must finally navigate and which bring the book to its subtle but lovely conclusion.