Appearances

"I come here when I fear my soul/has fled forever," says the speaker in Appearances, about a place where land, water, and sky converge. In poems that take their shape from daily walks around a teeming harbor, Michael Collins meditates on nature, though not nature as "some place you visit/some museum to nostalgia through," but as a place of meeting and confrontation between nature and civilization, art and subject, consciousness and the unconscious, life and death. The poems in this sequence...