114 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews away as insignificant or unwanted, turns out to be a tiny moth; this, in turn, illustrates the importance of Gerber’s close looking—what Krishnamurti called “the flame of attention”—without which we might otherwise miss a great deal of the beauty, the fine beauty, of our lives. Gerber’s diction can be quirky, even a little obtuse: words like “alembic ” and “eremite” and “iridaceous” seem dropped into poems that otherwise have the vocabulary level of highschool English. Yet even this feature is part of Gerber’s idiosyncratic style, which is somehow immediately sensory and metacognitive at the same time. For example, in remembering when his father died, the speaker in one poem switches from past tense to present and then notices that he has done so, musing, “Does it mean we’re always in the present wherever we may be thinking?” This, then, further illustrates that the past is never past if we summon it fully enough with the imagination —a mini-Proustian conclusion. At their best, Gerber’s poems disarm with their unpretentious style and vivid images or tropes. For example , in one poem we read “the fire flaps like heavy canvas in the wind.” In another poem, we read “the clatter of the mower whirling / through a still spring morning—the bleating of the stems / that cling to the blade.” Yet too often the poetry seems like chopped-up prose with a fairly flat sonic quality. For example, consider the following five lines: “She pants and thumps her indefatigable / tail against my leg // when we pause on our gentle walk / over the hills and still / defers to her nose above all other callings.” This is a fairly proselike , straightforward description of action that spans five lines—quite a few lines in a short lyric. We have no real defined rhythm, no sonic weaving of assonance or consonance, no figurative language. One can only wonder what Billy Collins or Tony Hoagland might have done with this baseline image. Of course, Gerber is not Collins or any other poet; he has his own distinct style, but this reader wishes there were more vivid passages like the ones quoted above describing fire and a mower. Gerber at his best sets the bar for his other poems, and the collection is uneven in this regard. Still, Gerber’s poems are authentic, and there are plenty of passages and poems in this book to reward reading. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Lorna Goodison. Supplying Salt and Light. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 2013. isbn 9780771035906 At their best, Lorna Goodison’s poems observe the unsavory in history and society even as they guide us firmly toward sources of redemption . With compassion and empathy, Goodison writes about human failure and triumph in large and small measures. “You’re perplexed / as this postcolonial scholar unearths plot / after heinous imperial plot buried behind // our botanical gardens. . . . // [We] lay / down ourselves careless in beds of canna / lilies . . . // human beings come in order to draw strength / for the week from our own Hope Gardens.” In poems that range from Spain and Portugal to the Caribbean and evokeElGreco,Columbus,PaulRobeson , and Charlie Chaplin, Goodison renders historical idioms in deeply personal fashion. “All I desired / was a quiet life grafting poems onto roses / singing slow at home near blue mountains. / What am I searching for outside this known / world, why am I a followfashion Columbus / gone off the map.” As always in her poetry, Goodison writes with rich appreciation for the material, tactile, sensory world around us. “I acknowledged El Grec’s broad brush plains, / ochre and green the rolling dry brush hills, / the old olive trees, the long light glancing off / storied buildings within which highly skilled / craftsmen still discipline hot steel into swords.” Katherine Pancol The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles William Rodarmor & Helen Dickinson, tr. Penguin Books This tale follows two Parisian sisters, Josephine and Iris. Iris, a high-class woman bored with her chic lifestyle, receives a contract to write a historical romance. She convinces her penniless divorcée sister, Josephine, to pen it under her name, promising her the proceeds—a great trade-off until the novel becomes the smash hit of the...