A Treatise on Stars

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars extends the intensely phenomenological poetics of “The Star Field” in Empathy, which appeared over thirty years ago. The book is structured as a continuous enfolding of poems, each made up of numbered serial parts, their presiding poetic consciousness moving from the desert arroyo of New Mexico to the white-tailed deer of Maine and between conversations with daughter, husband, friends, pets (corn snake and poodle), and a woman, or star-visitor, beneath a tree who calls “any spirit in matter … star-walking.” These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the channeling of daily experience, to gestalt and angel, dolphins and extraterrestrials. Here, family is a type of constellation and “thought is a form of organized light.” All our senses are activated by Berssenbrugge’s light-absorbing lines, lines that map a geography of interconnected intelligence—interdimensional intelligence—that exists in all sentient objects and sustains us. This is not new age poetry but poetry for a new age, rigorous of thought and grounded in the physical world where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”