Trace of One
“Joanna Goodman . . . [is] an extraordinary talent. . . . Her poetry taunts us with abutting styles, juxtaposing as it does the sacred and profane, the lyric and colloquial. . . . [She] provides us with work of special genius.”—Eric Sellin, Literary Review
“In this remarkable first book, Joanna Goodman finds language for conveying extreme stages of emotion, whether belonging to modern lovers or to ritual participants in New Guinea. . . . Goodman depicts sorrows in such a way as to make them our sorrows, the joys our joys.”—Grace Schulman, author of The Paintings of Our Lives
“The poems in Joanna Gooman's Trace of One hover between the physical and spiritual worlds. They are poems of hectic grace, busy converting one matter into another, transforming identrity and space, and bridging distances while discovering new ones. . . . And what propels a reader through Trace of One is the affecting confidence with which Goodman interrogates mystery—not the least of which is a relationship, which she regards with careful awe. Here we have a poet of luminous observation, sharing a voice both vulnerable and daring in its humanity . . . a startling first collection.”—Crossroads
In Trace of One,real geographies merge with spiritual ones, just as details of the speaker’s physical and emotional worlds intertwine with the transcendent realms of science, religion, and myth. Joanna Goodman’s poems share a sense of spatial and temporal displacement—they are love poems to a place, whether it be a field, a room, or a paradise—they celebrate their subjects, but they are also poems of grief and solitude. The poems resonate with ethereal echoes paradoxically emitted by an increasingly demystified world in which mechanical explanations for the workings of the human mind and body bump up against the mystery and obliqueness of the soul.
Contents
I
Tebaide
…Took Form Again
Falser Certainty
de’ Fiori
The Succession of Parts
Take Aim
Beech Tree in March
Enchanted
Benares
A Light Arch of Cloud, Ten Fingers Wide
On the Holy Friar Crossing a Suspension Bridge to Paradise
Conversion
This Is Joy
Directions
Pian dell’Arca
Coming of Age
II
Wave
Trace of One
How Did You Come to Know
Reasons for Everything
Of Force and Distance
Where to End
Port de Grave
Departure
Watermark
What Brought Them There
The Aftermath
Resuscitation
Recitative
The Dry Spell
After Being Called Naïve, I Consult The Single Source for People Who Need to Be Right
Examples of Use
What You Can Expect This Month
Coming Up Violets
The Moon Smiled Cheekily
Home
Laws of Motion
In an Excessive Corridor
Notes