Two Trees

Human character and human destiny - will and fate - these issues have always pervaded Ellen Voigt's work, giving her poems of relationship, her exploration of an individual past, rare depth and power. Now in her fourth collection, a sustained meditation infuses the work, examining the myth of self, the human compulsion to remedy or augment fortune, and the limits of "what's given and what's made from luck and will." Where will and fate collide is what chiefly occupies Voigt; and destiny, in these poems, is rarely generous. Within the structure of the collection are three sets of musical "variations"; each illuminates some aspect of the longer poems and fuses with the poet's brooding studies on beauty, art, and the instability of perception. For the first time, with Voigt, the past is neither claimed nor repudiated. Instead it is dangerously remote, incomplete, as in the title poem, where "the mind cried out/ for that addictive tree it had tasted/ and for that other, crown still visible/ over the wall."