Frail-Craft

We were at sea, together at risk, and he was a poor fisherman. He happened to fill the equation in the geometry of appetite I trace. And so you see it's not so much about the eye as whatever is made to serve the master who asks for wine, wants the pickled fruits de mer alongside the treatise on navigation and the maps that show what oceans hide.

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Announcing the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize

Jessica Fisher’s Frail-Craft is winner of the 2006 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and judge Louise Glück’s fourth selection for the series. The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”