Rare Earths

Prize-winning novelist Deena Linetts' collection of poems "Rare Earths" has made me fall in love with poetry all over again. Deliberate and delicate, Linnet's ambitious work weaves a precise and unique spell on even the casual poetry reader by creating a mysterious universe haunted by the ghosts of women and . and The result is a book of poetry that can be read as a novel or as a collection of icy verse gems that sends shafts of light into the deep morass of the soul. "Rare Earths" is structured in two distinct but interrelated parts: The St. Kilda Manuscripts and I Live Past You. In the first section, we are presented with delicate narrative and lyric poems in which Linnet considers the ravages that temporality and space place on the mind. Set up as a fragmented verse story, these poems are actually the "found" documents of Mairi MacIntyre, an architect who traveled to the frigid and barren island of St. Kilda in the North Atlantic off the coast of Scotland on an archeological excavation. Haunted by the ghosts of the women that had lived on the island when it was inhabited,. Mairi examines her life and her desires in journal entries and correspondences to her family. The second part of the collection focuses on poems written by a traveling companion of Mairi who was present on the archeological dig on St. Kilda's. She, too, is haunted by the lives of the St. Kilda women but even more so by the death of Mairi. "Her" poems are gorgeous meditations on Mairi's obsession with the women of the now-uninhabited island and on the themes of loss and time that Mairi wrote about in her journal and letters to her husband and mother.Together, these two parts help establish "Rare Earths" as a collection of post-modern poetic puzzles that require the active reader to reconstruct not only the life of Mairi MacIntyre but also decipher a complex time continuum that traces the impact that St. Kilda had on the women who lived there and those wrote about them."Rare Earths" was a semifinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2002. In a world of slam poetry and lazy words masquerading as verse, Linett's work (call it a collection of poem, a fragmented novel or a hybrid of both) rewards the demanding reader by haunting them like the ghosts of the desolate island of St Kilda.Last word: read this immediately!