Book Description

The Perseids is a book of poems whose central concern is the way in which memory, perception, and imagination act as lenses to "magnify" experience, creating a state of heightened observation and attention to detail. The book contains two central points around which the other poems are clustered. First, the "Meditations in the Voice of Robert Hooke," a series of two poems, take on the persona of the seventeenth-century microscopist and inventor Robert Hooke, who was the first person to document verbally and graphically the micro world made newly visible by the invention of the microscope. In these poems, Hooke wonders at the fineness of creation, and is moved to expressions of religious awe by the perfection in the forms of nature compared to those made by man. In the second poem in this series, Hooke recalls a summer day spent with his mother in their garden, and meditates on the especial vividness of her presence with him in his memory and imagination, despite her death many years before. The other poem most critical to the collection is the title poem, "The Perseids." A late twentieth century attempt to create a version of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," this poem proceeds from a perspective common to several other poems in the collection: that of an airplane. This particular airplane is flying over the Long Island Sound at night, bringing the speaker of the poem home. Through the speaker's imagination and memory, the perspective of the poem shifts from the airplane itself to a moment during a childhood camping trip when she first saw the Perseid star showers with her family. The modes of vision and creativity involved in exploration and science form the main subjects and themes of this book, whose settings include a biology fieldwork session, the father's science classroom, and Linnaeus's Lapland explorations. Even poems not concerned explicitly with science, such as "Art and Archeology" and "The Zero at the Bone" (which concerns an exhibitionist) place and portray experience "under a microscope," rendering the landscape with scrupulous detail