AN EXCERPT:
“Oh, Allan Peterson. I thought I knew thee. I thought, To read an Allan Peterson poem is to expect the precarious, the poised, the anticipatory, the appointed. An aesthetics of the delicate edge. Imagine a soft rolling ball, the movement of one image tumbling so easily into the next, or an image that could shift its weight slightly, but enough that any reader, even the trained poetry reader, would wince, because it feels like the poem might possibly slip, as though Peterson is going to let the poem fall off this delicate, so comfortably soft ball. It won’t. It doesn’t. The miracle of Fragile Acts and All the Lavish in Common is how the poems keep their reader situated, balanced, between, OK, cared for. How? It’s Peterson. Oh, Allan Peterson! That’s all it takes. His is the bounty of Imaginative Intelligence. How was it poetry trusted him with this brand of intelligence? Every piece of an Allan Peterson poem feels like a machine of soft cogs with soft balls rolling among them, and all delicately snug against one another.”
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