A Passing

Siegel's book is a meditation, a held breath, a chord lingered on and released, the silence eloquent as the music. In these poems, memory both preserves and fails, distorts and clarifies. She meets small deaths (a hummingbird, a cat) and large (her own loved ones, and victims of war and the Holocaust) with a steady gaze. But there is also the cherry blooming outside the window, Degas' dancer, a child's new language "that sputters off your lips and drops / ripe as a juicy pear in my lap."—Mary Makofske

The poems in Joan I. Siegel's A Passing offer startling bardic moments. In a poem's anguished speaker, a sudden transcendence takes place. In the reader, a sudden awakening ensues from a "window's shocking brightness," or a subtle "memory of a window," or the profound emptiness of "molecules that never touch."—Sandra Graff