The Disappearing Letters approaches familiar poetic themes—love and loss—with intuitive animation. The poet takes a direct view of the oblique and a slanted look at the obvious, creating a landscape with springs of great joy and also dry places where loss, wistfully remembered, is confronted and transcended. Edelstein is a poet of the first order; she can harness her innate spontaneity to produce finely wrought, imaginative poetry. An elegy to what’s come before us and a celebration of the living, The Disappearing Letters is an instruction manual on how to pay very close attention while daydreaming.
See — each ant staggers into the nest
with a dream-shaped crumb.
There they go, there they go — the swallows
who were late for school, doing
their extra arithmetic.
Stand here long enough and a dragonfly
will perch on your index finger,
the first note of hundreds.
Hear the plop of a palm-sized stone
hefted into the pond? It is a frog moving head first
toward center, squeezing those legs
that would be wings if water were air.
The earth must be glad: why else
would these great clouds lying low in the grass
seem like the doffed hats of giants leaving a party?
Or very cruel, to make this white violet,
then hide it under a leaf.
Listen to “Don’t Wait Up,” “Eye Chart,” “Charm to Be Read in the Year 3494,” “Votive,” and “After Korean Proverbs,” read by Carol Edelstein:
Listen to “She Answers the Question I Dare Not Ask” and “Love Song on Stilts,” read by Carol Edelstein at Perugia Press’s 20th anniversary celebration at Smith College on November 12, 2016: