Figure 1

In Figure 1, Beth McDermott offers us an eclectic array of poems that evoke scenes of life and art with precision, brevity, and great intensity. The insights that accompany them feel honestly earned, and time and again, the surprise of exactness invites a new way of seeing. Brimming with intelligence, her recurring meditations and observations, both metaphysical and literal, sweep over these poems like "a white sea without a coastline." As the award-winning poet and essayist Marianne Boruch notes, "these elegant poems by Beth McDermott are curious creatures of mind and eye calmly unfolding in equal weight and austerity, cool as distance but excruciatingly close as if a microscope could think out loud. Taking on both the natural world (the ghost orchid, blackbirds, "a pin oak" falling before expressway excavators, etc.) and genius artifice (Vermeer, Stieglitz, Caravaggio, Degas…), this poet defies her own lament that "if only she questioned the face value of beauty." Because in fact McDermott again and again does that, her work not pretty, not out to please or endear, instead growing brave as science and patience are, and somehow post-apocalyptic. Figure 1 (a stunningly apt title for this collection!) unnerves by a measured, mysterious step-by-step chill. Which is to say, these poems never apologize or self-serve as they stop human time."

Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest. She is editor-in-chief at Cider Press Review and lives with her family in the southwest suburbs of Chicago.