Trace of One

by Joanna Goodman

In Trace of One,real geographies merge with spiritual ones, just as details of the speaker’s physical and emotional worlds intertwine with the transcendent realms of science, religion, and myth. Joanna Goodman’s poems share a sense of spatial and temporal displacement—they are love poems to a place, whether it be a field, a room, or a paradise—they celebrate their subjects, but they are also poems of grief and solitude. The poems resonate with ethereal echoes paradoxically emitted by an increasingly demystified world in which mechanical explanations for the workings of the human mind and body bump up against the mystery and obliqueness of the soul.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The density of the scenery in this book is what I am most impressed with. The language makes me slow my reading so that I can collect the scene, along with the subtle shifts that suddenly happen within those places.

It is also interesting to see how Goodman uses parts of religion (my favorite being "Conversion") to direct the ideas in the poems. Most often it feels as though the idea becomes the mental space which she then furnishes with a more concrete location.