70 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews call to “Let the syntax crack!” and “voice” becomes “an old tangle of synapse.” The poem “Calendars” is “a poem in chants for four voices”: Demeter, Persephone, Hades, and a Greek chorus. Like all the other mythic poems in this collection, “Calendars” works for contemporary readers, and the language is, for lack of a better word, gorgeous, engorged with color and imagery. This is not to say that Finch’s poems don’t engage with the present or with contemporary issues—there are poems on incest and abortion, love poems, nature poems, poems of women’s friendship, and an elegy for the poet’s father: “Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly / past the long edge of the last human shore, / there are deep windows the waves haven’t opened, / where night is reflected through decades of glass. / There is the nursery, there is the nanny, / there are my father’s unreachable eyes / turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy? / His is the death that is circling the stars.” “My father’s unreachable eyes” is a fine example of Finch’s facility with emotionally powerful imagery, and the stanza displays her graceful use of meter. Finch’s poetry, plays, and performance pieces, infused with the spirit of thousands of poetic predecessors , remind us that poetry and theater were once wedded and that, in poetry, emotional and intellectual meanings are inextricable from their material properties: voice, word, sound, form, and rhythm. Everyone should have a copy of Annie Finch’s Spells on their shelf, for those hours when patterned rhythm and sound seem the best approximation of the soul’s speaking. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Oklahoma City University Durs Grünbein. Mortal Diamond. Michael Eskin, tr. New York. Upper West Side Philosophers. 2013. isbn 9781935830078 Durs Grünbein’s philosophical poetics in Mortal Diamond come to us in English from Upper West Side Philosophers, a publisher that proclaims to focus on “philosophical thinking steeped in lived life.” This small book of dense poems is framed as a “spiritual journey through the labyrinthine cosmos of the human soul,” regarding the “paradoxes of creatureliness.” Through Grünbein’s treatise on what it means to be alive as related to other living organisms, the divine, and past philosophers, he questions what he can really proclaim to be true, and what part of that truth he can question. Sandwiched between the translator ’s preface and notes are thirty poems that vary between one and six pages of small type (a book you can carry along in a purse or lunch bag), which on any given page will challenge the intellect as much as the aesthetic of verse. Divided into five sections, tropes of extended metaphor , allusions to mythology, and internal rhyme thread the individual parts into one work. Many of the poems center around theology and various musings on God and his existence , including those of Descartes, Pascal, Augustine, Malebranche, and Dante, often through dialogue with these thinkers of the past. Alongside a tradition of religion, Grünbein follows the histories of geometry, biology, and astrology. He focuses particularly on Pascal and his perceptions of God: “like a pulsar, he is light years away from us, yet, with the regularity of a pulse, he sends palpable, hot and cold waves through the human heart” (“The Indian of Spirit: Bagatelles on the Life of the Philosopher Pascal”). These poems claim that we find God in the scientific explanations of what we can see and sense as humans, an interesting take on bringing heaven to earth. Though addressing the cosmic divine, Grünbein focuses in on the microscopic—actually seeing things through a microscope—details of tiny creatures and the technical language of science and mathematics. He relates philosophy to looking at animals and landscapes: “The land adorns itself with cones of white: the trees / That with his wintry hand the mighty arrangeur / Refined / . . . A folio of sheets of white, which he alone inscribes / . . . A brand new dawn of pure geometry / . . . snow helps to understand perception” (“The Snows of Today,” the first canto from Grünbein’s novel in verse, On Snow or Descartes in Germany). The speakers of these poems will not...