These are poems about looking at small things carefully, weighing them in the mind like pieces of an enormous jigsaw. Everything—even the things that have never made sense—must somehow fit in. But where? How?
This is the third full collection of a poet experienced in the ways of words. She knows what she is doing. She welcomes the reader in. Then, with absolute precision and quiet, keen-eyed intelligence, D. A. Prince offers her take on life. It is like no-one else’s.
TWO PLANTS
Look, I’m saying leaf and already
your mind is playing it. Leaf-ish, leaf-shaped,
leaf-green (whatever that is). No longer
my selfish leaf but the air between us—
leaf-breath, leaf-edged, and fresh
as the season you’ve chosen for it,
in close-up. Whenever you hear leaf
you enter its time: whether
unfurling or falling, or even
straight in the high noon of summer’s clock,
or quiet in a wall’s untroubled shade,
you’ve grasped it. My leaf is another matter—
of itself, and turning inwards—but yours
has the sappy spring of the uncoiling year,
new-minted. Or I think it has.
