Poetry can be a direct conduit to the most populist, universalist sentiments or reflective of our personal dreams and longings. Allan Peterson's Fragile Acts introduces us to a poet capable of changing from the personal and interior to the global and exterior in a single work, sometimes in a single line:
"A pinwheel in the heart spins off oxygen like sparks
people singing anthems try to cover with their hands.
A pure Indonesia under my pillow opens its markets
every night to music, caged birds bought to be released."
Fragile Acts takes chance after chance with rhythm and meter; poems begin and end in unexpected places yet never seem incomplete. Peterson addresses the shrinking of our world through technology but also pays heed to the splintering and cognitive dissonance resulting from the torrent of information hurtling into our heads:
"At night when stars fall on Alabama
water goes granular and steps back, dreams improve us
with their thick pastels, revisits in tints.
Maybe the astronauts called from their cloudless telephones
with news from Long Distance:
Romans invaded Arabia Felix, Columbus discovered Ohio."
It is from these shards of the modern world that Peterson arranges his poetry, mosaic-like, into bold and beautiful forms.
Peterson deserves a wide audience. He possesses great observational power, offering an unusual worldview that assimilates disparate strands of vision and event into art that is timeless. Kudos to the McSweeney's poetry series for championing Peterson's work--and for the wonderful physical beauty of this edition of Fragile Acts. --Donald Powell, freelance writer