Allan Peterson

Perhaps Allan Peterson's most accessible collection, these short poems brushstroke homely images into thoughtful eloquence. Musing on aging and the body, Peterson thinks "of making English out of birdsong" as natural images interplay with daily tasks and the poet tries out his meanings. Mortality lives beside the innocence of the Other as a deer eats his ivy and returns his stare with no guilt. Three horses struck by lightning lie dead, "their eyes open/focused behind us on a long thought."

Peterson's "long thoughts" here merit daily rereading. Living with this book is like having a thoughtful, observant friend who always finds just the right thing to say as he looks out his window at our world. .… (mer)

Allan Peterson's "Fragile Acts" is a slim volume - only 84 pages - but it took me three weeks to work my way through it. The poems are so marvelously dense that I found they had to sit with me for a while before I could move on to the next one. For the most part they seem similarly structured. He starts with a theme which gets abandoned before it is fully developed and he then turns to a theme which becomes the heart of the poem. It seems as if the initial image of the poem triggers the main theme, but Peterson leaves the the initial image intact as a testament to the process. Most of the poems seem to focus on how humans continually try to see the mysterious in what is inherently non-mysterious. Death is just death. Religion is just diversion. Nature is just natural laws. The mysterious is often our insistence on organizing disparate events into a revelation that's just not there. These poems constantly challenge the comfortable, and that is what makes this book so wonderful.… (mer)