New Books In Poetry

The poems in Katy Didden‘s debut The Glacier’s Wake (Pleiades Press, 2013) are civilized and dignified and so are their surfaces: sophisticated soundscapes, pitch-perfect diction, a humane voice. And in The Glacier’s Wake, we do, in fact, encounter poems that exhibit a high-level of competency as it relates to craft. And it’s certainly true that someone who devotes time and energy and improves their skills is indeed involved in a virtuous endeavor. Dedication to poetic craft, however, is not only a bulwark against vice, but almost always a sign that a poet is using craft to veil a great suffering, and I sense Katy Didden’s poems are doing exactly that. Didden’s technical abilities have less to do with a deference to tradition, but have to do with a more urgent obligation – protecting both the reader and the poet from her grave interior life, which is one of the most generous gestures a poet can make. We flourish in her poems because the poet protects us from her. But