After the First World

Christine Casson's debut collection is rich with quiet surprises. Delicacy of description, metaphor that unfolds like worked lace, and the underlying iron power of story characterize poems as wide-ranging as the lyric "Mimosa," from the book's first section, to "Zaubermantel" and "Cradlesong" from the ambitious sequence that brings Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, gifted and obscured sister of successful composer Felix Mendelssohn, to life. With delicious precision the poet builds a bridge between the gardens of Europe and blossoms in a bridge between the gardens of Europe and blossoms in an American city, between her own life and that of a nineteenth century artist. The poems, like fragrance and music, lift and stay, a span that can bear the weight of our desire. This is a fine singing, and Casson is a poet to watch. -Betty Adcock In their rich, meticulous language and in their wide-ranging perceptiveness, the poems in After the First World roam and entwine themselves with convincing realities. Christine Casson's first collection a fine poetic debut. -Tony Hoagland Such a pleasure to find a voice as ardent as it is cool, opposites held in elegant balance: a fastidious sensuality, an intellectual musicality, poise in the face of implacable time-turns of phrase and an artful use of line, which, like a slip knot, tightens its grip on the falling weight of what it holds: "I turn to the work/at hand, unravel line/into usable lengths,/spin loops/that will suffice, for now/ against the slip of earth, its silent undertow. -Eleanor Wilner