The Persistence of Vision

The second poetry collection from Sacramento’s Jane Blue lives up to the promise of its title with sparkling detail, as the poet directs her gaze both inward, toward memory, and outward, to the natural world. The poems sparkle with detail and a sharp sense of place: “Borges in the Napa Valley,” for example, gives us white geese in the vineyards, “weeding, gnawing at mustard, at yellow oxalis / collecting their paychecks of flowers / while Borges let the breeze touch his face / and saw what he always saw.” But in the section titled “Can’st Thou Heal,” Blue’s riffs on Emily Dickinson’s poems suffer a bit from the rather academic attention paid to their precursors. That weakness is more than offset by the unexpected good humor, elegant language and unflinching poetic vision in the poems.