In this stunning first book, Rosanna Warren writes with wisdom, grace, and pure intelligence “as though to seize on a new life.” Exploring the complexities of nature and art, she traces continuous travail between the earth—in its tangle of roots and cyclical consolation—and the restless and protesting mind. Thus we encounter the struggle for sustaining generations of life in the villages of Europe, the ruins of Crete, a fresco or bas-relief. In elegies of love and death, we learn the legacy of poet Max Jacob, and “the clarity of being alone,” but also that we still have to touch to believe, and that love, to believe in itself, must dress up in death. Yet sources of the future are also brought tenderly to us through the image of an unborn daughter, a child’s room in autumn, and the knowledge that “gene by gene, the tiny transcriptions continue.”
