I Can't Remember: Poems

"Cynthia Macdonald's poems are quite extraordinary in their range and daring. She is brilliantly versatile in adopting the views, attitudes, or moods of fictive or actual persons different from herself, and she does so with a delicate empathy. She can be remarkably witty, as well as deeply moving, and sometimes even ruthless in her insights, which are more like X rays than snapshots. She is a poet of many skills and formidable dexterity."
--ANTHONY HECHT

This book further extends the range of Cynthia Macdonald's ambition and achievement. From the beginning her poems have read like letters from the unconscious, full of wit, drama, invention, and intelligence. In the last decade, without sacrificing those pleasures, her work has deepened, becoming more passionate, more lyrical; the language, as Edmund White described it, "silvery, transparent, harmonious."

All these qualities remain, but to them has been added a kind of wisdom about where we are, where we have been, and where we may be going. She asks questions more often than she gives answers, testifying that "what is clear is never really clear." Yet the reader closes the book bathed "in the clarifying light that glances off the winter road," and in the feeling of desire of "Vermeer's Lady Reading at an Open Window."

Praising Cynthia Macdonald's poems, Carol Muske once noted that they "alter everything we take for granted in poetry," and, in another review, Liz Rosenberg remarked on the poems' "gorgeous, almost baroque quality. Her work continues to surprise and please--and disturb."