Precarious

Allan Peterson, in PRECARIOUS, his fifth full-length collection of poems, refuses the easy path of a consoling clarity, opting instead for a difficulty that more accurately reveals the blurred perspective of one human being's singular fixity from his place in Nature. What there is to see or know shifts, hardens into focus, then flies away into the collapsing moment when the eye misperceives or the mind suddenly remembers or misremembers . . . or comes to rest on a centering image or idea. It is challenging poetry and yet there isn't a trace of cynicism in this work. Like a modern day Cezanne, Allan Peterson writes poems that slowly clarify via the subconscious, moving by increments into focus in the conscious mind. The attention to detail functions as a mosaic that coalesces into a whole by poem's end, and we are but a fragment of the world depicted, and yet, like Peterson, we are also actively engaged in this splintering into wholeness.