The Thinking Eye

Jennifer Atkinson’s The Thinking Eye, her fifth collection, looks at the syntax of our living, evolving world, paying close attention to the actual quartz and gnats, the goats and iced-over, onrushing rivers. The poems also look at the looking itself—how places and lives become “landscapes” and the ways the lenses of language, art, ecology, myth, and memory—enlarge and focus our seeing. If it’s true, as Gaston Bachelard says, that whether a poet looks through a telescope or a microscope, [s...