Radial Symmetry

 

Radial Symmetry

by Katherine Larson

Yale University Press

2011

 

 

I'm halfway through a longer novel, but taking a break to read some poetry. Katherine Larson is a working biologist as well as a poet, and Radial Symmetry is so far her only collection.

 
Larson writes about love, about a loved on dying, about a research project on a Mediterranean beach, about loneliness. Her poems tend to refer to a specific moment in time and space, when she felt a particular emotion in response to a certain stimulus. She's very effective at evoking the specifics of both the place and the emotion.

 
When I read Kimiko Hahn's poems earlier this year, they reminded me of little essays. Larson's feel more like single memories - individual moments trapped in glass. For whatever reason, I think I like Larson's work better.

 
Larson uses a lot of oceanic imagery, and also frequently references sea birds, mollusks, insects. They're both real and metaphorical, but not romantic. She writes about the stink of rotting carcasses on the beach, and viscerally describes how an animal's body is turned into a meal.

 
Most of Larson's lines are short. They usually break mid-sentence, creating pauses that interrupt how how you would read it, if it were printed out like prose. Some of her poems are just one long stanza. The others are usually made up of 3-line stanzas. The shortness of the lines fits the mood of someone slowly recounting a memory, adding details as they surface in the mind.