from Poetry Flash, December 1998
By C.G. MacDonald

In the course of the less than four dozen pages of poetry in Eve, Annie Finch transforms herself into a hawk, a bell, a horse, a constellation, a cat, a snowflake, a coy mistress, an unspecified raptor, and a wing. Her shapeshifting may be more overtly metaphorical than that of the recently deceased Carlos Castaneda, but Finch's changes seem at least as significant and deeply felt. Castaneda's metamorphoses serve as passports to various self-discoveries. Finch's journey is toward an imagined paradise-toward the post-patriarchal possibilities of culture, language and human relationships, routed through the remnants of pre-patriarchal myths and folkways. Instead of peyote, Finch's chief mode of transportation (and transformation) is through incantational rhythms, imagery and rhymes. The poems take an even greater variety of forms than the poet. . .

In the poem "Tribute," Finch claims Emily Dickinson as her chief literary influence . . . and it is to her great credit that a reader familiar with Dickinson will not feel that Finch suffers by this self-imposed comparison. Gnomic, lyrical, intricate, and deft, Finch's poetry brings Dickinson's to mind even without "Tribute." If Finch's work rarely attains the oceanic amplitude of her model, it has a post-feminist jauntiness and a theoretical and cultural sweep that were unavailable to Dickinson. Finch's trust in the intelligence and sensitivity of her reader is close to the bond she describes between herself and her unborn child in a sonnet called "The Raptor" . . . This is a poetry that can -please don't try to picture this-achieve a "flying speech," while keeping an intimate, almost umbilical connection with the reader. Or if you must visualize, think of one plane refueling another in mid-air-a poetry that technically precise, that risky and spectacular.

Finch's generation of poets were not generally encouraged to explore the possibilities of form. Her impolitic choice was to use everything in the toolbox, and to learn to use it expertly. To debut with such maturity and accomplishment is rare. Here is a full-fledged poet that literary culture will need to track and study in flight, and who any reader of poetry will want to enjoy.

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch