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Article: Fuel.(Review)
- Article from:
- Poetry
- Article date:
- March 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Modern Poetry Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Fuel, by Naomi Shihab Nye. BOA Editions. $12.50.
Reading a poem in a magazine, like coming on an island in fog, can be a happy surprise: gathered in a slim volume, the islands turn into a peninsula--or sometimes into so big an island, like Australia, that they establish a continent. Set side by side, they talk among themselves, comment on each other, add, enrich, build subtext, resonate. They make their own intertextual harmonics. Laying one section of landscape against another, one portrait beside the next, they fashion a make-believe world that compensates for the perfect one we've never had. Every time we open a new book of poems we're looking for an imaginary ...