Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals

by Sandra McPherson

Constructed in two parts, this collection embraces secretly related the poetics of natural history and artistic discoveries of self-taught folk artists.

Edge Effect is Sandra McPherson's most original work to date. Constructed in two parts, the collection embraces secretly related the poetics of natural history and artistic discoveries of self-taught folk artists. Throughout, waves from one poem mark the shores of others. In natural history, an edge effect occurs where two communities, such as land and sea, overlap, that zone becoming more diversified than each of them. McPherson explores this effect in nature and art, questioning our notions of inside and outside, center and margin. Profound and moving, she recasts the very premises of formal understanding in poetry, accommodating at once the arts of nature and the nature of art.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2011

About the author

Sandra McPherson was raised in San Jose, California. She went to college in California, then studied with Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington. She writes of her relationships with husband, daughter, parents, teachers, and friends with a sense of both the possibilities and limits of intimacy. Her poems are oblique and often difficult, yet are always firmly anchored in perception and experience, and she weaves vivid images culled from nature into what Contemporary Women Poets contributor David Young characterizes as "rich, complex, and deeply satisfying poems." In collections that include the National Book Award-nominated The Year of Our Birth, At the Grave of Hazel Hall, and Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals, McPherson has increasingly honed her unsentimental, insightful verse, imbuing it with images reflective of diverse folk arts and refining her expressions of a cultural perspective that is uniquely American.

Reviews

[edmondegreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprisingly/ridiculously good

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Davis, Ca poet. She has a way of making each line important.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conceptually, I swoon over this book, but in execution, I was not quite as interested.

[Mills College Library]

811 M172e 1996