The Physics of Transmigration - Softcover

Pit Pinegar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 097620911X ISBN 13: 9780976209119

Publisher: Antrim House, 2005

Synopsis

This third poetry collection by Pit Pinegar tells the story of a love affair, its beginning, middle, end, and new beginning. The poems, replete with life's "quotidian miracles," are gorgeously sensual and at the same time philosophical and mystical. The "transmigration" mentioned in the title underscores an element of psychic communication that is quite extraordinary. This is a wholly life-affirming book and one that no reader can peruse without being changed.

About this title

Review

The lush poems in The Physics of Transmigration have an extravagant energy, forged from desire and the rich music of verbal play. Pinegar is at the top of her game: "I want bright colors, deep roots,/ loamy soil, the soak of rain,/ a reign of sun, and the glow/ of a moon garden: Shastas,/ Bloodroot, Goatsbeard, Bellflower." These crystalline poems astonish us with a story that transcends time. But it is an old story, perhaps of old souls, and after all, there is at its heart the simple clarity of love: "Some nights,/ wind rattled the casements,/ billowed the curtains to a gauzy/ froth. And you--against/ the stark white pillows/ in every kind of light." This exquisite book will haunt you! --Cynthia Hogue

Pit Pinegar poses an urgent question: what do we do once our "spiritual DNA" is permanently altered by an experience of love? Shakespeare's Juliet, insisting the lark's song was a nightingale's, wanted to prolong her wedding night. Pinegar, in this highly original sequence of love poems, manages through the imagination to stop time. In aubade after aubade, the lovers' bed remains the center of the world and the heart changes the laws of time and space. Read this book straight-through: these remarkable poems build on themselves like a philosophical treatise written with passion and grace. In "Inquiry into the Nature of Desire," the speaker is asked, "What do you want?" "Everything," she responds. "Can you be more specific?" Her answer says it all. "That is specific. I've left nothing out." In this remarkable book, Pinegar takes extraordinary risks and succeeds in putting "everything"on the page. --Theodore Deppe

Like many a good love story, Pit Pinegar's The Physics of Transmigration leads me through frenzied page-turning, straight from beginning to the end, no pause. Ah, the excitement, the satisfaction, that sense of something inevitable completing itself. But something else, too: contemplation and a quiet noticing of quotidian miracles. It may be that what Pinegar asks of love we also ask of poetry to "[hold] time backward and forward past embodiment." These poems give us that, and more. They live their creator's manifesto -- that "poetry might be practical, sense made pure and simple" -- and go straight to the heart of love, its common, daily wonder. --Alison Meyers

Edition details

• Publisher: Antrim House
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 097620911X
• ISBN 13: 9780976209119
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Cover Photograph ByLaurie Coppedge
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 92