Listening to the Thunder, Poems

You fall quiet when you hear a great truth, and each one of Helen Tzagoloff's riveting poems in Listening to the Thunder lets you enter that silence of significance. From pictures of World War II Russia in a very young child's eyes to images of post-war America from an adolescent's view, to the perspective of a sophisticated woman and mother, these poems are piercingly clear, without judgment, in their stunningly deadpan lines. Huge upheavals funnel down into a single artifact, say, an abandoned apron, in Tzagoloff's unforgettable mixture of innocence and experience. The poems are searing, funny, moving and as charged with atmosphere as the moments before and after thunder. Molly Peacock