Shimmer

Wendy Barker's new collection, Shimmer, sparkles with arabesques of image, deft swerves into insight. The two discrete series that make up this volume together comprise a meditation on mortality by focusing on the phenomenology of mourning, the "radiant" surface of things: a Chinese scroll the speaker deciphers; the heirloom (sometimes plated) silver she has inherited. These poems "gleam in the light" of Barker's lyric precision, and radiate powerfully with the "primal force" of an ancient female wisdom "within the earth," which Barker channels. Shimmer bewitches.

Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth