The Mercury Fountain

Insight depends on attentiveness, but can also strike us spontaneously as revelation. The poems in this collection are unified by the urge to look into things and reflect on them, but the responses they represent are as varied, and as revelatory, as the subjects they address: vegetable carving on a cruise ship, where to read poetry, a death-row inmate's last meal. By turns formal, informal, solemn and touching, quizzical and resolute, these poems are consistently informed by Warren Wilson's scrupulous eye for detail. He celebrates the ways in which we engage with the world – both with the analytical gaze of a crystallographer, and the impulsiveness of a sculptor designing a mercury fountain. This is his fourth collection.