Radiant Beyond Rescue: Sandra Alcosser's Gorgeous Poetry

Recently, in describing works by poets like Lucie Brock-Broido, reviewers use the word gorgeous. That may be an influence of Keats or at least an extension of the more recent Georgian poets like Walter de la Mare, whose lavish lines dripped with jewels, spices and haunted silences.

I'll contend that Sandra Alcosser's lines were carrying the contemporary fire of gorgeousness back in the early 1980s--not just in the sense of lush imagery and exotic cadences, but also in the sense of the profound and overbearing--the loading of the senses to the point of illness that Poe strove to create in his synesthetic short fiction. In "Skiing by Moonlight," Alcosser writes, "Why will a person freezing to death/Inch into the false warmth of the moon? Eros is the wound./ White will go to shadblow. White will go to orchid bloom./Except by nature--as a woman, I will be ungovernable."

Orchids, shadblow, snowpeas, swamps, moss, worms, palmetto bugs, ducks, the aurora borealis (heaven's beast), and ultimately the Glory Monster iris chase us and suffocate us in the Nature that governs Alcosser's otherwise ungovernable feminine. There is something thick, evil, beautiful, jilted and redemptive in the gratuitous sensory quagmires of Alcosser's poems. Sometimes I leave off reading them with the mild fever akin to love-sickness.

As the poet says of a boy who floated downriver on a punky plaque of ice:

Imagine careening slick water,
over peamouths and shiners
on a punky boat of ice, like orbiting
the planet on a tempered glass

windshield, one crash
and all would shatter, not shatter exactly,
but fracture full spectrum, like life
as we know it--radiant beyond rescue.