The Beauts

Through this tilted tumbler / glass, in a restaurant, / I view the moon, / see-through and magnified. These lines that open Terri McCord's poem "Through and Through" suggest her penchant for looking at the world from whatever quirky angle she can extemporize. How lucky we are that in this collection she shares with us her brilliant discoveries. Among her many skills, McCord is a master of startling transitions and stunning metaphors. These are poems that must be read again and again in order to fully appreciate all that lies beneath their initial charm. McCord's new collection is, indeed, A Beaut. -Cathy Smith BowersYes, / my leitmotif is beauty / beauty at every end, writes Terri Lee McCord, but she doesn't take us there by any of the usual routes, and what is revealed as beauty has little to do with what we might have expected it to be. Elliptical, quietly intelligent, and charged with surprising perceptions, this collection is a stunner. -Claire BatemanTerri McCord is a painter as well as a poet, and I continue to be surprised and delighted by her visual imagination. She sees both clearly and deeply-as her words sometimes glimmer, sometimes flare, always illuminate. Like the artist she praises in "Believing Design," She has learned /which strokes which hues // faithfully coax the eye / into believing believing // in permanence of a kind. This is a lovely book. -Gilbert Allen