One Wave Standing

"One Wave Standing" follows an extended metaphor as it passes through the literal geographies of ocean and desert, and the figurative one of love and family. A meditation on the nature and art of life and land, Fox alternates autobiography with the theoretical physics of growing up, marriage, and divorce. Permeating the whole is the presence or absence of waterfrom Point Reyes to the Great Basinhow the world is made of oceans or, as in New Mexico, what once was sea. The poems deploy punctuation almost as if it were rhyme, opening up a still deeper structure where the metaphor of wave turns into a sign of itself, and becomes a carrier signal bearing news about the nature of poetry, and its rise and fall and rise within our lives. Bill Fox composes an elegant series of waves, that explore dislocation and location, loss and recovery, memory and desire.Arthur Sze