Glass Factory

Book excerpt: Inspired by science, a gritty and profound engagement with nature, and our fleeting fabrications on this planet, McCabe generates a durable delicacy that will astonish. Says Ilya Kaminsky, "McCabe, knows that darkness doesn't come onward but we are 'falling toward it, and sometimes/it is beautiful, framed in flame.' She is a kind of poet who knows that words, like paper cranes, may carry us, 'feather and bone.' When I read this, I think of Mahmoud Darwish who believed that clarity is the original mystery. In McCabe's clarities, too, lie her deepest surprises, and just like a fisherman in one of her poems, she relies 'on the tacit consonance of ice.' And her music! There is so much astonishment in her syntax, in tonalities. Kathleen Graber adds, "In a collection that honors both the natural and the man-made world, the production of both the field and the artist, the poet asserts that only change is certain. Just as the mind misremembers, clouds, rivers, flesh, and even rocks, dissolve with time. A drop of blood from a small cut is a startling reminder that even the physical body is flowing. Yet in a world in which all matter is destined for ruin, we find a speaker who again and again not only holds the elusive present in her fierce attention but also praises the very processes that, while ushering new fruit from the trees, erase all that has been, including the familiar self."