The Transit of Venus

by Susan Firer

In Firer's poems, place, often the western shore of Lake Michigan, provides an imagistic and sonic landscape in which language explores the 'empire of skin' with its daily happinesses and sorrows, gifts and losses. Often blue light illuminates these poems and frequently the language of a Catholic childhood shows up. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams's poems say 'Use everything,' and Firer receipts, anatomy, astronomy, clothes poles, paintings, checklists, quagga mussels, questions and grapefruit. Birds fly through these poems, insights 'For a minute / we are disguised / as human.' That quote concisely sums up Firer's main transience and time and with what and how we fill our brief time here on earth.

102 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2016

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I obtained an ebook version of Susan Firer's “The Transit of Venus” by mistake when I confused her book of poetry with the excellent novel of the same title by Shirley Hazzard. So since I had it, I read a few of Susan Firer's poems in the ebook, discovered that they were close to wonderful, and then bought the print version.
It turns out that she is about seven years my junior and we grew up on opposite sides of Lake Michigan, the influence of which is explicit in a number of her poems.

However, I think that see is a poet of that ekos, the homeyness of people and nature of the west shore of the Big Lake (what we called in on the east shore). Even if you live in a really different place, or maybe especially if you do, her poems speak the secret breath of that ekos.

[Genevieve]

"Oort Cloud, nursery of comets, have / you met those who send their ashes / into space?" (14)