Persons, Places, & Things: Selected Poems

We grow so accustomed to hearing-and, let's admit it, to uttering-cliches that to encounter a person who seems unconstitutionally incapable of either produces an immediate shock. Arlene Pollack is like that, and so is her poetry, which is a good thing, because when poems get predictable you may as well use them to wrap fish. Ms. Pollack's art stuns. Even more importantly, her ideas stun, through a freshness of awareness, an untarnishable integrity, and a profound technical economy. She is a true artist, rarely comfortable or satisfied, and she writes very beautifully about practically everything but most beautifully about love; and when a truly honest person writes about love you are in for a treat.