A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye

These are poems haunted by climate collapse and personal mortality, but also rich in music.

This collection has much in common with the perennial gardens with which it begins and ends, its beauty the sort that opens outward and proliferates, sowing itself. echoing across years.

Delight is the dominant mood in the book. Pelizzon seems to find the world (and the words that describe it) irresistibly interesting, even at its worst.

V. Penelope Pelizzon’s magnificent poems are epyllions, ‘little epics,’ that synthesize a stunning breadth of experience. Their geographical circuit—from Brooklyn to Africa to the Middle East—provides the backdrop for candid meditations on time and mortality, agency and accident. Like Elizabeth Bishop, that other consummate traveler, Pelizzon riffs on ‘assurance / of ruin’s recurrence’: Awful but cheerful.

Pelizzon’s virtuosity underpins a collection that is urgent and elegiac, hilarious and harrowing, its detours into memory as vividly realized as the author’s obvious joy in literature and life.

This is a brilliant book. I love its variety of forms and music, its humor and intellectual seriousness (how often does one actually learn things from poems?), its high-spirited embrace of life. This is a book I will keep close over the years.

Elegies, romances, eco grief, comedies, recipes, histories, and keen instruction: these poems hold the world in their lines. V. Penelope Pelizzon is a poet like no other, straddling centuries and continents with every brilliant line.

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, V. Penelope Pelizzon is a part of all that she has met. With inexhaustible interest in the world and in the Aristotelian activity of living, she is a permanent student of people and other complex systems—cultures and landscapes, nations, economies, and empires, families, a garden, her dog, herself—and of how they are conceived, brought to term, nurtured, and mourned for. Pelizzon has the impartial eye of a naturalist and the pliant mind of a philosophical pragmatist but venerates words and word sounds and the figurative imagination like a true neo-Romantic. The result is an original, perspective-altering poetic sensibility that can be devastating, funny, hopeful, absurd, or attuned to the surprising harmonies of real experience.

‘What a curator the mind is,’ writes Pelizzon of her ‘scrappy cabinets of curiosities,’ these poems that feel inlaid with acacia, ivory, and swarms of silver bees and wrapped in rarest silks, redolent of spice and tea and good old human sweat. I dazzled at the music and utter brilliance of this collection.