The Difficult Wheel

In The Difficult Wheel, Betty Adcock writes about time, about losing the past yet never being able to lose it. Hers are poems about vanishings, about grief, and about folly—our absurd attempt to cancel time and space, to abstract ourselves out of history and out of nature, and to distract ourselves from death’s specter.

Adcock’s verses fuse formal pattern with the chaos of rapid change, music with grief, the world’s presences—deer, bird, fox, all that shakes the “shuddering loom”—with the absences that time has dreamed and language must confront. Out of her personal losses Adcock imagines the larger ones we are facing at the end of the twentieth century.

But there are celebrations here, too: a simple field of wild flowers on an Aegean island becomes music, memory, a “pearl of great price.” A woman caring for injured birds in her backyard aviary keeps “bits of heaven’s weather, pieces of the sky”—and because of her earthbound love, they will rise.

Arresting language and challenging vision distinguish these poems and this poet.