The deering hour

Karen Elizabeth Bishop's the deering hour pushes against the edges of lyric to find the moments and spaces where the natural, object, and human worlds meet. The voice is a decidedly female, at times maternal, engagement that repositions the lived center so that the margin, the edge, and the boundary become rich, inhabitable spaces. These are lush, layered poems that deal in the porosity of multiplying questions, fluidities, and transformations from plant, mineral, and animal to the human. They trade in wings, beaks, and feathers; orogeny, rocks, and subduction zones; the moment when the animal and plant take over. Language becomes its own marker, so that what we know of the human animal is a pause, a call, a limb, and a bloom in the world and on the page.