Errors and Angels

To err is to wander, and the speaker of Maureen Bloomfield's Error and Angels wakes to find that she has strayed, like Dante's traveler, from the path whose end is light. Voices from her Catholic school days, figures from the Judaeo-Christian mythos, and fragments from the history of art inform her ironic, iconic quest. Invoking Iphigenia, Sarah, Mary, Magdalen, Giuliana, and others, she questions the confluences, in women's lives, between renunciation and fertility, beauty and its abnegation-acts and attributes whose ramifications imply a provisional, deleterious kind of power. Bloomfield writes of shifting landscapes-London, Paris, the American Midwest, Florida, Florence. These places align the interior and exterior mirrors as she inspects the conjunction between fate and folly, misapprehension and mistake. At the heart of these poems is the mystery of language as it demonstrates the exigencies of goodwill and of grace.