The Secret Signature of Things

Transparent poems that gesture gracefully toward the great silence at the heart of things.

Much of this poised and luminous book is rooted in an idea of epiphany, an aesthetic of everyday incarnation; not the sudden and profound manifestation of essence or meaning, but the smaller steps taken toward it. The moments in which, as Joyce writes, “the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.” If epiphanies are for theologians, perhaps the little steps towards them are for poets like Eve Joseph, and for all of us who attempt to see beyond the names we give things to the names they give themselves.

Shelter

The rubber plant in the hospital cafeteria is waiting for rain. Palms up beneath a sky of fluorescent lights, its leaves are broad enough to be roof, temporary shelter, shade to small creatures caught in the open. The hiker, for instance, who has made a fire with wet twigs and hunkers down to wait it out under his wide blue tarpaulin.

“…Eve Joseph’s craft and attention, her choice of the perfect word, give a kind of holiness to the song of everyday life. And if some of these poems are honed down to their elegant bones, others are expansive and wide open…” – Patricia Young