Bücher von Ted Pearson

Pearson's scalpel-like critique of the voyage, each word a careful enunciation of where the line has been, there remains the constant question of where it will go and what it will become. For just as Emily Dickinson once asked, "Is my verse alive?" so Pearson, with every word, challenges us to face down (if quietly and with grace) the dormant future. And it isn't metaphor. Pearson is all-too-aware of the tenuous state of our condition, our art.

When Basil Bunting declared that 'Pens are too light. / Take a chisel to write,' I imagine he had in mind the kind of exact and exacting poetry Ted Pearson has been steadily producing for decades. In The Markov Chain, Pearson presents a series of eight-line poems, each composed of four exquisitely crafted alexandrines.