What’s in a Name

In a limpid, poised poetry Ana Luísa Amaral evokes interlinked substances (a book, a mood, a mosquito, color itself, love and trust as central, being a mother, domestic moments and their metamorphic transformations) and affirms Being in the world with both a bedazzled clarity and a notable patience with mysteries and divisions. The strong poems of visitations by the muse herself evoke lyrics of Sappho, while Amaral's modernist side-glance takes in the oddity of the intersection of us and the cosmos of atoms and chance. Here is a lucid, forthright poet charmed by the paradoxes of each poem, by the tiny gestures and traces of life faceted within each poem, and by the vocation of poetry itself.–Rachel Blau DuPlessis