![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/34\/2022\/11\/questions.png\")
<\/p>\nRen Hen Press, 2022
\nPaperback, $16.95, 119 pages.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Diane Thiel\u2019s third collection of poetry, Questions from Outer Space<\/em>, comes after an interlude during which the poet devoted her energies to a travel memoir (The White Horse<\/em>) and the translation of contemporary Greek fiction. Her first two collections (Echolocations<\/em> and Resistance Fantasies<\/em>) garnered acclaim, including the Nicholas Roerich Award, for their intelligence, wit, wordplay, and attention to form. These earlier poems explored family history and contemplated contemporary manifestations of mythic archetypes. Her latest volume skillfully deploys many of the same aesthetic characteristics that distinguished her first collections, while the new poems range widely from past to present to future, from house and home to international, interplanetary, and even interdimensional settings. It is a volume full of vivid, imaginative poems, a good many beginning as thought experiments that call to mind Italo Calvino\u2019s Cosmicomics<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The title of the volume suggests that the act of questioning will be both a central motif and the principal modus operandi of the poems that follow. And, indeed, a number of poems instantiate this propensity for questioning, e.g., \u201cQuestions of Time and Direction,\u201d \u201cQuestions from Four Dimensions,\u201d and \u201cNavigating the Questions.\u201d The intellectual bent of the collection is summarized in \u201cListening in Deep Space\u201d: \u201clooking for answers \/ telling stories about ourselves, \/ searching for connection.\u201d In one way or another, the poems in Questions<\/em> all pursue this heuristic. For Thiel, \u201cthe simplest question\u201d is capable of \u201copening the world again.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Many of the poems recognize and ponder the complications that science and technology introduce into our lives, especially the consequences of relying too greatly on gadgetry. \u201cTritina in the Time of the Machine,\u201d for example, addresses the implications of intrusive technologies at a time when \u201cin nearly every pocket,\u201d there\u2019s \u201ca small methodical machine\u201d always \u201cgrinding on.\u201d Another poem, \u201cRemotely,\u201d wittily mulls the consequences of living in the remote and virtual modes forced on us by pandemic realities. Whether it\u2019s a remote control, internet access, Zoom video conferences, or even the electric typewriters of yore, in poem after poem the poet mulls the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating new technology into our lives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thiel\u2019s wry and sometimes whimsical way of looking at the world (a trait readily apparent in her previous volumes) is woven throughout these poems, often making light of, or even mocking, the slippery and careless use of language in social and corporate settings (\u201cKwickAssess\u201d). Other poems play with familiar expressions (\u201cSleeping Dogs,\u201d \u201cBaby Out with the Bathwater,\u201d \u201cUnder the Rug\u201d) and in so doing discover new angles on old clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While Thiel\u2019s outlook is sometimes droll, she is just as often attuned to darker concerns. The poet repeatedly worries over \u201ca tear in the continuum.\u201d Some poems, for example, evince a plangent concern for environmental degradation (e.g., \u201cNavigating the Questions\u201d), a concern that is carried forward from her earlier volumes (such as the powerful poem, \u201cPunta Perlas,\u201d in Resistance Fantasies<\/em>). An underlying theme of these poems is \u201cthe way our actions decide \/ who or what is now \/ expendable.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A central conceit in the book, running through several poems, involves the first-person observation of life on Earth from the standpoint of sentient, empirical beings located elsewhere in the cosmos. In the view of these distant observers, humans \u201cgenerally \/ complicate things\u201d and are \u201chighly irrational.\u201d The poem \u201cField Notes from the Biolayer\u201d uses the distant observer conceit to tie together the volume\u2019s key themes of technology, environment, and connectivity. Thiel\u2019s extraterrestrial observers\u2014whose view surely coincides with her own\u2014note that as humans \u201care forced \/ to rely on the virtual world, some begin to realize \/ what they had been missing\u201d and are now \u201crecognizing the way their world is connected \/ within and also beyond\u2014the rivers, the oceans, the air\u2014 \/ the lovely layer that makes their existence possible.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As has been the case throughout her career, in these poems Thiel evinces a meticulous concern for the craft of poetry. Most notably, the poems are attuned to sonic patterns and echoes, or what Dana Gioia has referred to as the \u201cintuitive music\u201d of her poetry. She employs rhyme\u2014full, slant, and internal\u2014to good effect. There is also a good deal of assonance and consonance at work, as in this passage from \u201cTime Won\u2019t Do It\u201d:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We expect too much of time, <\/p>\n While Thiel is not a strict formalist, she pays close attention to form, with many of the poems taking one or another of the traditional forms, including a sestina, a pantoum, a villanelle, a tritina, along with several sonnet or sonnet-like poems, haiku, and tanka. When not employing traditional forms, Thiel devises nonce forms and often resorts to repeated stanzaic patterns. Several of the poems\u2014e.g., \u201cSleeping Dogs\u201d and \u201cIn the Mirror\u201d\u2014have a concrete quality. In her use of forms and sonic patterns, Thiel has much in common with her coeval, A. E. Stallings (the two poets share a connection to Greece as well, as both poets are married to Greeks and have spent significant time in Greece).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thiel\u2019s past work has shown her to be a smart, well-read poet, with a keen awareness of the poetic tradition. The range of references in this volume reveals some of her varied influences, both aesthetic and thematic. There are echoes of or direct allusions to numerous poets, including W. C. Williams, Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, D. H. Lawrence, Auden, Keats, and Swedish-language poet Edith S\u00f6dergran. All in all, it is a collection rich with references to literature, science, music, and art.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In \u201clooking for answers, telling stories\u2026and searching for connection,\u201d these poems succeed in \u201copening the world again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While Thiel\u2019s outlook is sometimes droll, she is just as often attuned to darker concerns. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":7298,"template":"","categories":[9,139,1569],"tags":[347,1868,201,1869],"class_list":["post-7293","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","category-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-diane-thiel","tag-poetry","tag-questions-from-outer-space"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\ngive it mythical powers,
\nbelieve a certain set of hours,
\ndays or years will be the salve
\nto solve it all. We treat it
\nlike an oracle, believing
\ntime will tell, expecting
\ntime to heal because
\nour sayings say it will.<\/p>\n