Frail-Craft

Jessica Fisher’s Frail-Craft is Louise Glück’s fourth selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary prize in the United States. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, the poet meditates on the problems and possibilities, the frail craft, of perception for the reader or the dreamer, maintaining that ‘if the eye can love – and it can, it does – then I held you and was held’. In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes, ‘What gives Jessica Fisher’s work its sense of form, of repose, is her perfection of ear. That repose, with its strange mobility, its accommodation of surprise, is Fisher’s particular genius. To enter these poems is to be suspended in them: like dreams, they both surround and elude.’ __________________________________________________________ Frail-Craft It’s a true story: we were at sea, together at risk, and he was very poor, a regular fisherman, from a family of such. He happened to fill the equation in the geometry of appetite I trace: for even the blind can see! And so you see it’s not so much about the eye as whatever is made to serve the master who asks for wine, wants the pickled fruits de mer alongside the treatise on navigation and the maps that show what oceans hide. Yet men still drown in order to know the difference between sky and whatever name you give to the deep. Otherwise they see the sea as surface, want to sit on the beach and say Look at me, looking at the sea!