Godwit

Poetry. Religious Studies. Women's Studies. GODWIT, by Eva Hooker, is a place of meeting, a "backlit city/ Of scarlet solitudes." It reaches for loneliness and the "hand in the small/ Of the back/ In-folding grace": it reaches for a "goodness that can make you blind" in "plain speech with lost rules of usage." The book's water metaphors are "legible footprints of matter" informing soul so that it has grammatical and syntactic shape. Its lake poems are "reading rooms made of water upright and edged." The books found there fetch both writer and reader to underwater work.

GODWIT begins in the midwestern prairie booming grounds and ends in the eastern tidal marshes where salt hay grows. Here place is anxious. As is body. Words taste of salt. Words of want. Of radical detachment. In the middle section, a sequence of poems imagines "the pediment of shadow," where soul is in a place that requires "ancient guides for travel." The last section of the book describes terra amata: the desert, the wild, the wandering sands, "the nothing that is not there/ And the nothing that is." At the last, the she of this book, must "pick her way through radiance with dirty shoes" and find her map to after.