Gayle Lauradunn’s Consider This is a book of wondering and of inquisitive attentiveness to the physical and the metaphysical worlds. Lauradunn invites readers to observe and to ponder with her. By turns philosophical, pensive, distressed, and accepting of what she witnesses and experiences, these poems give us a speaker contemplating not just the shape and motion of their own individual life, but the multifaceted, kaleidoscopic questions that arise from being human. “Fear and hope / collide and we come out the other side. / Hummingbirds vibrate their wings. The / music begins.” It’s a pleasure to listen in on the music of Lauradunn’s perceptions.
—Rebecca Aronson, author of Anchor
In searching, restless and unsentimental poems Gayle Lauradunn wrestles with personal and cosmic landscapes beleaguered by angst and grief. “At this hour what is succor is suspect / what is wished for becomes vapor.” Yet, Consider This is a collection that, “in a world hurling / into despair” yearns toward resolution and reference points that might guide us toward wholeness. Midst the glory of night skies, hyacinths, sphagnum moss and long love, this poet bravely traverses the “twisted shadows” in which we live. With a keen sense of history, literature, and science, Lauradunn asks us, poem by poem “How can we meet / the dark without knowing the light?”
—Barbara Rockman, author of to cleave
Lucretius, first century B.C.E. Latin poet and philosopher, lived for approximately 44 years. Based on the tenets of Epicurean philosophy, On the Nature of Things, an exploration on atoms and their movements, is Lucretius’ only extant writing. His poem was lost for a thousand years and rediscovered in 1417. In Lauradunn’s rendering, the first poem asks the reader to consider what may be suggested in the succeeding poems.
