Atlas

Like Atlas holding up the world, these poems elevate patterns of all kinds with an attentiveness that transforms.In language that is quiet yet forthright, Katrina Vandenberg’s poems capture the way events reverberate and repeat across time and place, as in one poem that links the image of the poet’s sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just “made over” on that day's episode of Oprah. Like a literal road atlas, the poems carry lines and themes from one to the next, building and commenting on images and ideas to create a conversation. Vandenberg draws on family artifacts, memory, and imagination to plot the intersections of love, death, history, art, and desire. One part of the book, “The Red Fields of Lisse (A Love Story),” focuses on a former partner, a hemophiliac with AIDS. Linking his tainted blood to the virus that made tulips so rare and remarkable during the famous “Tulipomania” of the seventeenth century, the poems comment on the attraction of things known to be fragile and short-lived and on the many resonances of blood.