Michael Gessner

Artificial Life Michael Gessner

Poetry. This collection, ARTIFICIAL LIFE, includes several night scenes, lit as if by an expanding network of fireflies. From a lofty but wordless height, the poet suddenly swoops towards some arresting detail--a party spilling onto a street, a compromised accountant, a wedding photograph, an urban development site, a picnic by a lake, wrinkles on a dog's face, an old lady in the mountains. Even a casual relationship is approached by means of a kind of fidelity, its incompleteness illuminated by a valid unsentimentality. And before he departs again, the poet leaves behind, in his words, an indelible quality, rather as the music of Apollo's lyre is said, by Ovid, to have lingered in the masonry of the walls at Alcathoe--Martin Turner.