The Likeness

These new poems by Martha Kapos represent an act of reclamation or capture: an attempt to retrieve someone whose loss has been experienced through illness and, ultimately, death. Taking as an epigraph a line from Richard Wilbur—"a thing is most itself when likened"—Kapos discovers various viewpoints from which to try to see the thing "being most itself." Often the viewpoints are visual ones, making use of the phenomenon of perspective with its effects of hiddenness, distance, or diminution. In every case metaphor is the guiding principle in these poems, which address how a figure is brought back to life through a process whose essence is poetic. The Likeness is a sustained elegy, an unfolding study in psychology and visual observation, and an example of the animating power of metaphor to reshape loss into presence.