'The New Yorker has written, "Gregerson's rich aesthetic allows her

best poems to resonate metaphysically." In this new volume, Linda Gregerson makes clearer than ever her passionate premise that the metaphysical only and always derives from our profound embeddedness in physical reality.

From subjects as diverse as the Nazi occupation of Poland and a breakthrough discovery in cell biology, Gregerson seeks to distill \"the shape of the question,\" the tenuous connection between knowing and suffering, between the brightness of the body and the shadows of the mind. \"Choose any angle you like,\" she writes, \"The world is split in two.\" One poem, \"Bicameral,\" moves from a child\'s cleft palate to a gunshot wound to the hanging skeins of a fabric in a postwar art exhibit. In the wool cut from the sheep to make the materials of art, she finds a tangled record of violence and repair: \"The body it becomes will ever / bind it to the human and a trail of woe.\"

Longtime readers of Gregerson\'s poetry will be facinated by her departure from the supple tercets in which she has worked for nearly twenty years: Magnetic North is a bold anthology of formal experiments. It is also a heartening act of sustained attention from one of our most mindful poets.'

"In the searching, extended meditations of her fourth collection, Gregerson (Waterborne) draws relationships between disparate subjects and historical periods with masterful assurance, trying to head off the dizzying sensation of loss or perhaps to prolong its effects. Often, the desire for divine reassurance is tempered by a cerebral wryness in response to witnessing desperation and suffering firsthand. In a poem about September 11, Gregerson writes, 'There are/ principles at work, no doubt:/ beholding a world of harm, the mind/ will apprehend some bringer-of-harm'; intellectualization artfully circumvents uncontrolled emotional response. Gregerson's elastic line lengths and flexible stanza structures figure her poetic access to recent and remote events and people, which are interwoven to create a fabric that can withstand the present. Gregerson self-consciously strives toward an understanding of universal order she knows she can never have: 'The world so rarely/ let's us in.' The poems are strongest when Gregerson's local, natural world becomes a portal to the metaphysical, and poems on mythological subjects and other artists are at times less moving. But at her best, Gregerson's compass points surely through a landscape in which 'what was/ the future — cinnabar, saffron, marigold,/ quince — becomes the past.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

As The New Yorker has written, "Gregerson's rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically." After working in tercets for some twenty years, Linda Gregerson makes bold formal experiments in Magnetic North. She investigates the elegant shape of a question, taking inspiration from subjects as diverse as the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Nobel Prize in physiology. In one poem, "Bicameral," she makes breathtaking leaps. "Choose any angle you like . . . the world is split in two," she writes. The image moves from a child's cleft palate to a gunshot wound to a shorn sheep to a modern art exhibit of hanging skeins of fabric: "the body it becomes will ever / bind it to the human and a trail of woe." Amid the torn, tangled record of violence and repair she finds that "the world you have to live in is / the world that you have made."

LINDA GREGERSON, a recent Guggenheim Fellow, teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and other periodicals and in The Best American Poetry 2001. Waterborne is her third collection.

'1 Sweet

4 Bicameral

8 Spring Snow

11 Make-Falcon

15 Bright Shadow

17 The Burning of Madrid as Seen from the Terrace of My House

23 Father Mercy, Mother Tongue

26 At the Window

28 The Chapel Doom

32 The Turning

36 De Magnete

41 Another Diana

44 No Lion, No Moon

48 My Father Comes Back from the Grave

52 Over Easy

54 Prodigal

57 Dido in Darkness

61 Elegant

67 Notes\n

'