For our joint celebration of National Poetry and Architecture Months, the latest book from the Yale Series of Younger Poets merges words and vision, Radial Symmetry, by Katherine Larson. In her last year as judge of the competition, Louise Glück writes in her Foreword: “It occurred to me that most poets who are, like Katherine Larson, deeply attuned to the natural world tend to be specifically attuned to a particular landscape.” Larson, who trained as a biologist, links the environments we perceive with expressive language, the job of any poet, and when she constructs spaces in her poetry, her vision is reminiscent of an architect’s. Perhaps within our own mental energies is the desire to create—or deny—the “radial symmetry” without, as seen through the synergy of emotive artistry with gardens, rooms, and cities constructed throughout civilization.

Glück continues: “Radial Symmetry has no one context; its shifting backgrounds take the place of motion giving the collection a feeling of progression or drama, as though movement in space substituted for movement in time.” Larson’s poetry vividly and anatomically produces the daily familiar with the cerebrally occult; for the shape of feelings and how they structure our lives, “a reader will remember these poems for their beauty, the profound sense of being in the present that their sensuality embodies, and a sense, too, of its cost.”

Djenné, Mali

Room full of barefoot tailors, open air

courtyard, the antique

sewing machines nattering on. Heat paired

with need, the slack

mouths gathering pollen, coughing while lime dust

drifts in the streets.

It’s market day.

Shops fill and empty like lungs—

Ribbons of black flies against the rust.

Under the mud mosque, stands of printed cloth.

A woman selling hills of green powder

(alcove of shade)

takes my hand. Her palm blooms with feminine

leaves, a palimpsest of henna and skin.

Radiant palm to my palm—

Hot flowers with such patient faces.

Copyright © 2011 by Katherine Larson.