In Primary Light (Iowa Poetry Prize)

John Wood is well known for his brilliant writing on the history of photography, but for many years he has also centered on his work as a poet, publishing in some of the very best magazines and gaining the deep admiration of many writers and poets. This book is testimony of his devotion to his craft - a fully realized, mature, and carefully constructed collection.
"In primary light things are clarified; / knowledge is optic and immediate, / so obvious its utterance is commonplace." Wood ( Orbs ), who has also written several nonfiction books on photography, is here most convincing in writing of the commonplace and our ways of perceiving it; his language is primary, precise, and sometimes rollickingly humorous. In "Here in Louisiana" he casts an eye on the comings and goings of cockroaches, and his observations are accurately humid, striking a balance between the gross and the lyric. Similarly, "Shitheads" takes the measure of confident mammon, of men who need "carphone, Rolex, deodorant . . .Masonic handshakes," and who maul "by their appetites." Wood knows them well enough to evokes but not patronize. Trouble comes, though, when rapture intercedes as an emotion and a literary motive: it leads the poet into overwriting that imposes distance between the poetry and the primariness of his experience. In one poem, for instance, Wood describes Maine summer light as "broad and bronzing" in its "lemon pungence, brazen / and honeyed, full as wheat and amber's / wide ranging." By the time these and other qualifying descriptions conclude with the "gloried and lambent joy" that light and time can inspire, the excess seems rococo and several times removed from the eye. This volume is a winner of the 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize.