Surfaces

Michael Lesher's Surfaces is a celebration of what might be called the central paradox of poetry: that every attempt to plumb the depths of lived experience must begin and end in the impenetrable surface world of words printed on paper. Somehow the shape of a collection of letters placed on a page and the sounds they produce when pronounced have to convey a sense of the most inward levels of experience. This would appear impossible and the collection's introductory quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Give me truths;/for I am weary of the surfaces/and die of inanition -- only underscores the difficulty. Yet the goal of these poems is precisely to find those truths not by fleeing the surface of poetry -- line rhythm diction and so on -- but by embracing it. And in doing so of course to reveal beauty as well.