Tools Of Inquiry Research Articles

A Process of Becoming: In Favour of a Reflexive Narrative Approach

As both researcher and practitioner, or in service educator, I often resist situating myself within one discrete tradition. For this reason, I turn to narrative as an approach to understanding. I believe employing narrative allows me to draw from a cross-section of scholarly work including reflexive inquiry, critical analysis, and autoethnography. Often qualified as a method or a tool of inquiry, the narrative approach is rarely examined for its epistemological underpinnings. Thus, A Process of Becoming refers to both the promotion of a methodological approach to knowing in social science and to the medium through which practitioners can become better acquainted with themselves.

Experiences from First Time Blended Learning Courses: Implications to Design and Delivery

The convergence between face-to-face and computer mediated learning environments, also known as blended learning, not just require restructuring traditional class contact hours but also rethinking the course design to optimize student engagement (UNESCO, 2010). In this paper, the experiences of one hundred sixty six (166) online learners from six (6) first-time blended learning courses conducted using Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (MOODLE) were examined. Adapting the Blended Learning Student Survey Questionnaire by Garrison and Vaughan (2008) and the Presence in Online Community of Inquiry Tool (Swan, et al., 2008), it was revealed that compared to their non-hybrid courses, there is an increase in the amount and quality of interaction between teachers and other students. This is strengthened by positive perceptions to the three types of online presence in the blended courses as expressed by the students. This resulted as well to significant differences in student achievement for some of the blended courses. It is recommended that additional features such as video lectures and more synchronous online communication be incorporated into the redesign of the courses to further develop online understanding and interaction among the participants. Corresponding professional development for the teachers on these features be conducted. Provision of quality internet connection within the university should also be ensured to improve delivery of the courses.

Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.: Promoting Historical Inquiry through Music

Music elicits emotions and acts as a cultural definer of class values, political beliefs, and economic life. Students are intrinsically drawn to and possess an innate ability for interpreting music. Music, moreover, activates learning in ways other content sources cannot; yet, it is utilized infrequently in social studies classrooms as a historical inquiry tool. Harnessing its emotive and seductive power, music as a primary source naturally scaffolds understanding of the zeitgeist through sensory engagement and lyrical analyses. Focusing on Born in the U.S.A. (Springsteen, 1984), authors demonstrate how examining music can impart views often absent from mass media portrayal of historical events and eras. A music listening and analysis tool is employed as a heuristic for critically interpreting music to explore the past. The historical thinking processes presented offer an inquiry-oriented curricular model for integrating music and social studies.

Search engines: From social science objects to academic inquiry tools

This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities involved in incorporating publicly available search engine data in scholarly research. In recent years, an increasing number of researchers have started to include tools such as Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) in their work. However, a central ‘search engine’ field of inquiry has yet to emerge. Rather, the use of search engine data to address social research questions is spread across many disciplines, which makes search valuable across fields but not critical to any one particular area. In an effort to stimulate a comprehensive debate on these issues, this paper reviews the work of pioneering scholars who devised inventive — if experimental — ways of interpreting data generated through search engine accessory applications and makes the point that search engines should be regarded not only as central objects of research, but also as fundamental tools for broader social inquiry. Specific concerns linked to this methodological shift are identified and discussed, including: the relationship with other, more established social research methods; doubts over the representativeness of search engine data; the need to contextualize publicly available search engine data with other types of evidence; and the limited granularity afforded to researchers by tools such as Google Trends. The paper concludes by reflecting on the combination of search engine data with other forms of inquiry as an example of arguably inelegant yet innovative and effective ‘kludgy’ design (Karpf, 2012).

Martial Rape, Pulsating Fear, and the Sexual Maltreatment of Girls (παῖδες), Virgins (παρθένοι), and Women (γυναῖκες) in Antiquity

The variably sequenced tripartite noun phrase, παῖδες, παρθένοι, and γυναῖκες, is shown to be a coordinated noun series signifying “girls, virgins, and women,” not, as hitherto interpreted, παῖδες as “male youths” or as “boy and girl children” plus “virgins and women.” Further, “virgins” in this phrase is primarily an age designation meaning “emergent adolescent or virgin-aged girls.” The tripartite phrase is thus female-specific, and it reflects the three life stages of underage girlhood, emergent adolescent “virginhood” (or maidenhood), and womanhood as a sexually active wifehood and procreative motherhood. In relation to female groups, the tripartite phrase refers to females of mixed ages from girlhood to child-bearing womanhood. Although important in itself for raising the social visibility of girls and women in antiquity, this semantic argument also brings forth important new evidence from the orator Hyperides, the Peripatetic Clearchus, the historian Diodorus, and the Roman imperial-era Adoulis inscription about the sexual tenor and sexually acquisitive goals of populace-ravaging warfare against underage girls, virgin-aged girls, and women. The Neoplatonist Proclus discloses the resultant social availability of underage girls, virgin-aged girls, and women to be sexually objectified and maltreated. These new insights reaffirm the value of linguistics and philology as powerful tools of socio-historical inquiry.

Focalization, Ethics, and Cosmopolitanism in James Welch’s Fools Crow

Focalization, Ethics, and Cosmopolitanism in James Welch’s Fools Crow James J. Donahue (bio) 1. Introduction Building on the work of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, literary theorist Arnold Krupat (Red Matters) defines a cosmopolitan ethnocriticism as one that engages with a variety of methodological tools in order to explore the complicated tensions in literary works. Although aware of the pitfalls of what some critics might charge is another form of cultural appropriation,1 Krupat claims that the responsible critic is one who entertains a variety of approaches, one who works to include diverse methodologies, rather than relying on any single approach to cultural artifacts. In that vein, the following essay engages in a cosmopolitan ethnocriticism by providing a bridge between narratology and ethics in the exploration of inter-cultural communication. Specifically, I will examine a new means of focalization that I argue is employed in James Welch’s 1986 novel Fools Crow. By first establishing how focalization is connected to culture, I will demonstrate how Welch focalizes the narrative through the Blackfeet and the Anglo-Americans, in order to ultimately merge them into what I will call a cosmopolitan focalization.2 This focalization, I will then show, has significant ethical implications with respect to narrative representations of inter-cultural communication. In short, I posit that the structure of Welch’s narrative reinforces that narrative’s portrayal of successful and unsuccessful [End Page 54] methods of inter-cultural exchange. And I believe that further study of narrative form in ethnic American literature will benefit the study of literature while helping to refine the tools of narratological inquiry. A work of historical romance that fictionalizes the Blackfeet just prior to the Massacre of the Marias in 1870, Fools Crow has been celebrated by many critics as a window into a culture now lost. For Patricia DiMond, “Fools Crow reveals the other side of the story of the development of America, presenting a critical, more balanced perspective of history that serves to deconstruct the Euro-American’s concept of Indian barbarianism and reveal typical misconceptions and startling truths” (70). Similarly, Bette Weidman notes that, “There is a Pikuni social order to which Fools Crow is reconciled and that is universalized in the world of the novel” (91). The working assumption for both literary critics is that Fools Crow reflects a Blackfeet worldview in its narrative. Nora Barry, however, comes a bit closer to a full understanding of the operation of the narrative when she claims that, “Welch tells this history, for the most part, from the Blackfeet point of view” (3). I would like to build on her small clause “for the most part” in my explorations of the narrative composition of Fools Crow. For while most of the story is narrated by an apparently omniscient nonfocalized narrator who tells the story from the perspective of the Blackfeet—and in so doing uses Blackfeet words and place names, and accepts the truth value of the Blackfeet religious system and the reality of the spirit world—there are sections of the text that are narrated by a seemingly very different (though also omniscient and nonfocalized) narrator. Though small and clearly in the minority, these sections—ignored by many who write on Fools Crow—reflect the complexities of the cultural and ethical work of the narrative. Specifically, to borrow from Emmanuel Levinas, Fools Crow demonstrates that “ethics is an optics” (23); that is, we come to understand the ethical importance of the narrative by means of the narrative’s focalization, or how things are seen and understood. 2. Terminology Earlier critics addressing narrative strategies in Fools Crow appear to be working under the assumption that the narrative employs what Gerard Genette would call a nonfocalized narrator, or a narrator with zero focalization.3 Commonly, such narrators are unbounded in their scope or vision. [End Page 55] At first glance, this may appear to be true for the narrator of Fools Crow, who can relate the events taking place at various Blackfeet camps and move effortlessly between the actions of several characters who at various moments become the major actors of the story (such as Fools Crow, Yellow Kidney, and Fast Horse, to name a few...

ASSESSING STUDENTS’ EXPERIMENTATION PROCESSES IN GUIDED INQUIRY

In recent science education, experimentation features ever more strongly as a method of inquiry in science classes rather than as a means to illustrate phenomena. Ideas and materials to teach inquiry abound. Yet, tools for assessing students’ achievement in their processes of experimentation are lacking. The present study assumes a basal, non-exclusive process model of inquiry in experimentation that can be considered a consensus from multiple approaches: (1) finding an idea/hypothesis, (2) planning and conducting an experiment, and (3) drawing conclusions from evidence. The study confronted 339 secondary level students with three guided inquiry experimentation tasks on 3 days. Selected working groups were videotaped while experimenting. All the students reported their processes in a structured report form simultaneous to their progress. The generated videos and reports were analysed in a two-stepped way: (1) Experimentation was coded according to the process model into process plots; on basis of these, (2) process-focused performance scores were calculated considering logical coherence and immediacy of the inquiry processes. Correlative analyses show for two of the tasks that the report format yielded comparable performance scores to those generated from video data after students have had opportunity to learn the surveying formats (rS > .80). A first suggestion of a process-oriented assessment tool for inquiry in experimentation can be drawn from this study. It might be used to inform and complement secondary science instruction.

Repositioning Ourselves: acknowledging contradiction

The essence of this paper is to present a self-study that resulted in the awareness of discrepancies that existed between our beliefs and practices as teacher educators and educational researchers. On the one hand, we assessed the impact of our teaching on participants of a professional development program. We analyzed the participants’ abilities to explore student voices as input for improving the teaching of mathematics. On the other hand, as we categorized and characterized our participants’ reflections using the tools of qualitative inquiry, the end effect was to distort and even silence those voices as an input for improving our own instruction, denying participants both agency and identity. This presented us with a living contradiction since this stance conflicted with our belief that learners deserve both agency and identity.

Sociology Is a Martial Art

Loïc Wacquant’s article ‘ Homines in Extremis’ outlines five propositions about habitus that support a broader and richer use of Bourdieu’s famous concept. His article was a response to a new edited volume by Sanchez and Spencer under the title Fighting Scholars. In this article, I support Wacquant’s argument, but suggest that he undersells habitus as a topic of and tool for inquiry. I point to previous conversations about habitus and suggest that we may learn more about social phenomena by engaging the relational aspects of habitus and the social aspects of the incorporation of habitus.

Linking Foreign Policy and Systemic Transformation in Global Politics: Methodized Inquiry in a Deweyan Tradition

Change at the level of the international system as a whole has always been a challenging subject matter in IR. This is especially true with regard to the link between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation—processes of societal re-creation at the global level of interacting states, societies, and human beings which are significantly shaped by socialized foreign policy agents. In IR and foreign policy analysis, this link is largely taken for granted. At the same time, the connections between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation are widely considered to be essentially intractable in epistemological and methodological terms. As a result, the link has been surprisingly undertheorized. In this article, I will try to show how a Deweyan (or pragmatist) understanding of social action in general and of causal analysis in particular might help to theorize the link. More specifically, I will mobilize Deweyan notions of situated creativity, historical contingency, and event-processes as sites of interaction which emphasize the “existential” character of systemic transformation and agential resocialization. The article also reviews available methodological tools of disciplinary inquiry in order to show that many of the necessary tools to examine the links between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation are actually at hand.

Feeling beauty: the neuroscience of aesthetic experience

A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry. In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions of aesthetics and the arts. Drawing on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry, Starr shows that neuroaesthetics offers a new model for understanding the dynamic and changing features of aesthetic life, the relationships among the arts, and how individual differences in aesthetic judgment shape the varieties of aesthetic experience. Starr, a scholar of the humanities and a researcher in the neuroscience of aesthetics, proposes that aesthetic experience relies on a distributed neural architecture-a set of brain areas involved in emotion, perception, imagery, memory, and language. More important, it emerges from networked interactions, intricately connected and coordinated brain systems that together form a flexible architecture enabling us to develop new and to see the world around us differently. Focusing on the sister arts of poetry, painting, and music, Starr builds and tests a neural model of aesthetic experience valid across all the arts. Asking why works that address different senses using different means seem to produce the same set of feelings, she examines particular works of art in a range of media, including a poem by Keats, a painting by van Gogh, a sculpture by Bernini, and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Starr's innovative, interdisciplinary analysis is true to the complexities of both the physical instantiation of aesthetics and the realities of artistic representation.

When discourses collide: creationism and evolution in the public sphere

This review essay focuses on Ozgur Taskin’s discussion of the theory of evolution (TOE), intelligent design (ID) and the convictions of fundamentalist science educators and students in his paper entitled: An exploratory examination of Islamic values in science education: Islamization of science teaching and learning via constructivism. It examines the competing social discourses of evolution and creationism in the United States, which is partially maintained by national public opinion polls and states’ legislation about the TOE in the science curricula. The examination of US social discourses presented here is framed by James Gee’s (2008) theory that Discourses with a capital “D,” are unconscious and uncritical socially accepted ways of speaking/listening and writing/reading that are merged with “distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, [and] believing…so as to enact specific socially recognizable identities…” (p. 155). Such Discourses identify insiders of and outsiders to religious affiliations and other social or cultural groups. The context of this examination is unique in that is draws from the national conversation about the inclusion of ID alongside of the TOE in the public school science programs. Gee’s (2011) concept that Discourses serve as tools of inquiry guides the analysis of video recorded public messages from Bill Nye and Lawrence Krauss as well as Creation Museum president Ken Ham. The analysis and discussion of the national conversation about creationism and public education suggests that the education community must consider the global landscape of science literacy both locally and internationally. It also indicates that preservice and practicing science educators may require special training and support. In order to provide unbiased, religious-resistant, evidence-based science instruction, science educators must understand how to separate church from state regardless of their personal beliefs. They must also know how to navigate conversations about the TOE among diverse communities of learners that include both religiously and non-religiously affiliated students.

Qualitative inquiry in the history of psychology.

Despite the importance and ubiquity of qualitative inquiry, a comprehensive account of its history in psychology has not been written. Phases and landmark moments of qualitative inquiry are evident in variations that range from informal, implicit, and unacknowledged practices to philosophically informed and scientifically sophisticated methodologies with norms and carefully specified procedures. After the founding of psychology in 1879, qualitative inquiries were conducted by Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud, and William James, who assumed their scientific status. During the 20th century, with a rising emphasis on hypothesis testing by means of quantification, psychologists continued to use qualitative practices but did not include them in general accounts of scientific research methods. Although Gordon Allport (1942) called for bold innovation and an increasingly rigorous accountability, a delay in the systematic development of qualitative methodology took place even as practices continued to yield fruitful research in work such as Flanagan (1954); Maslow (1954, 1959), and Kohlberg (1963). Only between the late 1960s and 1990 did phenomenologists, grounded theorists, discourse analysts, narrative researchers, and others articulate and assert the general scientific value, methodologies, and applicable tools of qualitative inquiry in psychology. Between the 1990s and the present, a revolutionary institutionalization of qualitative methods has taken place in publications, educational curricula, and professional organizations. Examples of ground breaking, well-known psychological research using qualitative methods have begun to be examined by research methodologists. The historical study of qualitative methods offers a treasure trove for the growing comprehension of qualitative methods and their integration with quantitative inquiry.

Visual Images as Tools of Teacher Inquiry

As aspiring professionals, pre-service teachers must become good consumers of educational research as well as competent researchers who can use tools of inquiry to improve their practice and conduct their own educational research. Many, however, resist learning research skills or find difficulties in doing so. This article presents ways in which learning in a graduate research class was prompted by methods of multimodal analysis and composition. The graduate-level teacher candidates in the class were taught, in particular, to use visual images as analytical and generative tools, and in doing so, they came to learn about the research process and their role as researchers. Moreover, working with visual images allowed the pre-service teachers increasing clarity in observations and interpretations of what they were seeing in classrooms where they were observing. By using visual images, teacher candidates seemed to arrive at theoretical insights that were possibly predictive of future, productive classroom practices.

Totem and taboo: the embarrassing epistemic work of things in the research setting

Recent research on multimodal communication in the material world shows how things matter in social contexts and make a traceable difference in the unfolding of interactions. Interestingly enough, the artifacts typically used as tools of inquiry (i.e. the recording devices) are rarely deemed worthy of similar analytical attention, as if they were irrelevant or inconsequential to the organization of social interaction taking place in the field. Adopting a theoretical framework on distributed and hybrid agency, this article discusses and empirically shows how these objects play a crucial role in defining the institutional goal of the interaction and, therefore, contribute to the crafting of the data. The analysis of examples from a collection of references made to the recording devices in different research interactions illustrates the circumstances in which these references occur and the activities accomplished by participants by referring to these ‘embarrassing’ objects. In the discussion we propose that the analytical underestimation of the role of things ‘talked-into being’ in the research setting is consistent with and can contribute to a vision of research practices as a mirror of the social reality out there.

The Nuptial Mystery, the Sacrament of Marriage and John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them

Antiphon 18.1 (2014) 69–105 The Nuptial Mystery, the Sacrament of Marriage and John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them David H. Delaney Introduction The pre-papal manuscript Man and Woman He Created Them1 of Blessed John Paul II (to be canonized by Pope Francis on April 27, 2014) is a compelling theological anthropology that opens new pathways for investigating a broad range of theological topics and for showing their unity. One obvious topic is the sacrament of marriage, which, as a sacrament in the service of communion , is simultaneously a theme around which the unity of Catholic teaching can be expounded in an evangelical manner. John Paul II’s intellectual project is variously characterized as one of Lublin Thomism, Trinitarian personalism, Schelerian phenomenology, and Communio theology, among others. All of these capture aspects of his thinking, but I would argue that his intellectual foundation is first grounded in the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas. He situates every other philosophical and theological influence within Thomas’ metaphysical framework. In much the same way that St. Thomas integrated Aristotelian metaphysics into the 13th century Christian patrimony, John Paul II likewise incorporated many new lines of thought into the received tradition, and this is what we encounter in his catecheses on the embodied human person. With Thomist metaphysics as his foundation, he integrates new methods (foremost phenom1 Commonly called the “theology of the body” after he delivered it in the form of 129 Wednesday Audience catecheses from September 1979 to November 1984: John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006). 70 David H. Delaney enology as a tool of inquiry) and new insights (e.g., from the various schools of personalism) in order to explicate the truths of the Catholic faith to an age that has seemingly lost its ability to receive them through the classical manner of presenting them. Reading Man and Woman from the above hermeneutical perspective opens one to the profound insights John Paul II unearths. John Paul II wants to help man to rediscover himself, his greatness. He intends to provide an anthropology for a contemporary audience and so he goes to divine revelation to better understand who and what man is. Beginning with the insight that the doctrine of the Trinity reveals a Communio Personarum, a Communion of Three Persons, he considers anew the meaning of man created in the image of God. Returning to the Genesis creation narratives and using the analogia entis, he ponders the revelation that man is created in God’s image as male and female, and what this means for the human person. This becomes his personal approach to the theology of the nuptial mystery that has recently arisen from within the Communio school. But before continuing this line of thought, I should say a few words about the nuptial mystery.2 I. The Nuptial Mystery Tradition The Scottish Dominican Fergus Kerr of the English Dominican Province reluctantly points to nuptial mysticism as the theology that has become dominant in the new millennium, especially in Catholic ecclesiology and theological anthropology.3 The nuptial mystery marks much of John Paul II’s teaching, and we also see it present in his successor. Even if it is not a central theme in his theological work, as the prefect of the Congregation for the 2 It is not possible in this context to do more than provide a broad sketch of this theme. For a more detailed treatment of the nuptial mystery see Angelo Cardinal Scola, The Nuptial Mystery (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2005). For a systematic treatment of the Scriptural foundations of the nuptial mystery, see the forthcoming book by Brant Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom: Seeing Christ and the Cross through Ancient Jewish Eyes (New York: Image Books, 2014). 3 See Fergus Kerr, O.P., Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing , 2007) viii, 201. Kerr is clearly not happy about this, pointing out numerous concerns with this state of affairs. 71 The Nuptial Mystery, the Sacrament of Marriage and John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them...

PARTICIPATORY INTERVENTION USING APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY: OPTIONS FOR INSTITUTE OF AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH AND TRAINING (IAR&T) ADOPTED VILLAGES

There is extensive use of participatory approaches to research and development with the aim of involvingfarmers. These include Participatory Technology Development, Participatory Rural Appraisal and FarmerField Schools. These approaches have been criticized for focusing on deficits, rather than the assets of thecommunities. Appreciative Inquiry tool is now being integrated into participatory research processes. The studyaimed at using participatory tools and appreciative inquiry to enhance farmers’ understanding of opportunitiesavailable to them and the interventions that should be put in place to maximize these strengths to enhance foodsecurity in the adopted villages of the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training. The results showed thatAppreciative inquiry is complementary to the other participatory approaches and that rural communities haveunique resources and assets that can enhance food security. The rural communities were able to establish theircapabilities, turn them into opportunities and map out interventions for improved livelihoods. It showed thatusing this approach is a pathway for identifying and mobilizing communities’ assets and building theircapacities to be active players in determining their destiny, based on their unique circumstances. The paperconcluded that focusing more on what works in a community can lead to positive changes. Integratingappreciative inquiry into participatory processes is an excellent way of generating new ideas and action forfood security and more sustainable livelihoods. A paradigm shift toward appreciative modes of probing,planning, and intervention for sustainable development was recommended. Keywords: Participatory approaches, opportunities, assets, appreciative inquiry, adopted village

Realigning capital portfolios: international students' educational experiences in higher education

This paper reports on first year experiences of international students who use English as an additional language (EAL) in higher education in Australia. It examines how valued resources can foster a positive educational experience of these students from sociological perspectives. It draws data from an interview study, exploring narrative accounts of 17 EAL international students from nine countries about their educational relations and strategies across their first year of study. Their narratives were analysed through Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, capital and legitimation, as well as tools of narrative inquiry. The paper finds that the students took up strategies to realign their capital portfolios with new rules of the game. Their decisions were dependent on their personal trajectories and conditions on offer. This paper suggests that more effort needs to be made to understand international students' differentiated access to valued resources in higher education.

Leadership in higher education: examining the narratives of research managers from multiple lenses

This study explores the narratives behind how academics in formal leadership positions perceive their roles as leaders and their leadership development. Fifteen leaders in their varying capacities as managers of research in their universities participated to illustrate the complexities and challenges associated with their roles. Using narrative and discourse analysis, multiple lenses (“what”, “how” and “why”) were used to analyse the participants' narratives. This study then explores the impact of the leaders' perceptions on their teaching, research and graduate supervision roles. Results indicate that research managers' narratives replicate those of the storied lives of leaders with constructed images. The study concludes with some implications for policy and practice as well as suggesting the use of multiple-lens analysis as a tool for narrative inquiry.

Hands by Moya Cannon (review)

Reviewed by: Handsby Moya Cannon Christine Cusick Handsby Moya Cannon, pp. 64. Oxford: Carcanet, 2011. Distributed by Independent Publishers Group, Chicago. $19.95. A reading of Moya Cannon's poetry always brings us to an encounter with the unexpected. Her work in The Parchment Boat(1997) , Oar(2000), and Carrying the Songs(2008) has been acclaimed for its subtle yet profound encounters with the material world, its sense of the present moment situated against the grandeur of its past, and its engagement with the elemental forces that compel time. Cannon's Handscontinues these distinctive contributions to her provocative oeuvre. And yet, Handsrepresents a subtly more intimate collection of poetry, one that brings questions of personal relationship and family loss to Cannon's textured and dense poetry. Handsoffers the lyric meeting of the nonhuman natural world with acuity and precision. In poems like "All This Green Day" the lines unfold with detailed attention to color and context: "Here and there, in the green cloud of birch and hazel / above the hermitage of Santa Eulalia, / a wild cherry tree sings russet / and the mountain tops around us are furred with trees"—only to open further into the seeming invincibility of the scene: "The bare peaks far to the east / have captured a first fall of snow; / the trees and mountains carry on / as though nature [End Page 150]had not been conquered." With the slight turn of phrase, "as though," the poem takes on another layer of meaning, highlighting the vulnerability of the land, moving from scene to significance. Yet the final lines call the reader back to the always central materiality of place: "the grass depends towards evening / and the little scalloped slates shine in the dusk." Similarly, in "The Fertile Rock," as Cannon's lines attentively sketch a tidal scene, they simultaneously embed human life and history into the ocean's depth: "In May evening light / an exhausted silver ocean collapses./ It has carried so much to this island, / blue rope and teak beams, / dolphin skulls and fish boxes, / and once, a metal tank on wheels, / containing one cold passenger." In honoring the intertwined lives of dolphin, water, and human passenger, the poem eludes the false binaries of human and nonhuman life and then moves skillfully on to physicality of movement across the limestone strand: "It rises and collapses at the rim / rises and collapses again— / a mile of white, salt lace." The limestone and the cairns of Ireland's West echo and linger throughout this volume, but the poetry of Handsalso honors international terrain, tracking the "decanted" sunlight upon "a single maple tree" in "Driving Back Over the Blue Ridge," the late morning sunrise in the high Pyrenees in "October," the "wild cherry trees on the hillside" near "the hermitage of Santa Eulalia" in "Farrera Light," or the "hulks of the Bauges" in "Night Road in the Mountains." And yet, though the actual landscapes of the poetry's imaginative impulse extend beyond Irish borders, the imaginative perception is not far removed from Cannon's historical place, as in "Harmonic Vases," in which a scene shifts from the acoustic design of the Collegiale Saint Martin to a cultural tradition in the cottages in County Clare where "an iron pot / was buried under the hearthstone / to give resonance to a dancer's step." The sustained thread throughout the volume is Cannon's penchant to use perceptions of light as a tool of inquiry and discovery. Whether it is in the form of a moonbeam in "Hedgehog," the stove's fire in "Apple and Fire," or the sunset that turns the tree into a "red lamp" in "The Red Tree," Cannon's mindfulness to the presence of light is a connective refrain that propels the volume forward. And so, when she writes "I thought / only love could do it, / give us moments so complete / there is nothing behind us or before— / . . . but, sometimes, light can do it too," the reader is assured that she can trust the directives of luminosity in this poetry. This attention to light does not merely create a visual effect. Rather, in poems like "The Washing," it is the force that connects...