Scrutinizing the Dust

Marjorie Hanft's gorgeous poems in Scrutinizing the Dust create a sensuous world of sound and taste, as well as sight and touch. Both the American Midwest and Ancient Greece come alive in the "complex sweetness" she uncovers as she surveys a forest, a rainbow, the biography of a famous painter, and "the first color in language." Sometimes touching on the comic (such as impersonating the Statue of Liberty) and, at times, the tragic ("My father takes...a new dip...into the river/of forgetfulness," these poems, filled with quirky information, shed light and music on the animals, fruits and thoughts that pepper our world.

-Austin Alexis, author of Privacy Issues and For Lincoln & Other Poems

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Marjorie's poems epitomize beauty and brilliance in their impeccable attention to details that place us in the moment. We see her daughter's "scars / that turn from crimson to the color of her own skin." We hear the "small sounds cluck / in her throat." And always we learn. In the poem describing persimmons she perfectly yokes the intellect with the sensuous, "in Greece / what are called date-plums are bigger softer / with smoother skin..." Hers is poetry at its most remarkable, as her imagery enables us to reach perceptions we have never imagined, "Locate the meaning / of yellow & you will find that it blinks & flickers/ with intuitive intellect in the REM world of dreams." Together her poems weave a journey through memory, history, art and the vision of words, showing us the delicacy and elegance of language. In her poem "Note to Emily," Marjorie grudgingly accepts "a sightedness" she "didn't choose." Her acquiescence to that muse, despite herself, has gifted us with luminous and transcendent poetry.

-Olga Abella, author of two books of poetry, Watching the Wind and What it Takes; former editor of Bluestem and Karamu