After Image

A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms.” A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George’s After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—” Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet’s persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief’s terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George’s sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.