The Larger Nature

Poetry. THE LARGER NATURE addresses the longing to be at home everywhere. With characteristic humility, Pam Rehm seeks the common roots of life, proposing that "Whatever lives / lives equally with me." Through austere language and an abstract, associational logic, she filters out the noise of so much communication in order to hear the familiar as if for the first time. Maureen N. McLane offers a description of SMALL WORKS that holds true of the present volume: "There are very few concrete nouns or visualizable places here; instead we move through a realm of language pondered and picked at, with words transposed, broken open, hymned. This is, then, not a poetry of deep image but of deep word, Rehm sounding out in almost Heideggerian fashion the ramifying levels of a word's depths.... These poems move astonishingly close to a grim silence, yet they ward off that silence, taking the measure of our days as well as the ways we measure them."