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1995 |
The Locality Principle
Written in alternating sections of poetry and short prose pieces, The Locality Principle is, on one level, a perceptive and often wryly humorous account of a traveler's confusion and dislocation. In London, a narrator, presumably the author, is living on a street named after a nonexistent park, next to a garden he can see from a window but has no access to--a garden tended by a bizarrely ineffectual group of men and women who could be gardeners or possibly inmates from a local asylum. But Waldrop's is role as a displaced observer also provides the opportunity for a series of reflections on deeper subjects, such as concept of the soul, and the fact of his own mortality. Overseeing it all is the unforgettable, impassive Pee-Paws, a resident cat that spends night after night staring into the blazing fireplace: "Her response to the fire, I come to realize, is more complete than mine...to her it is obviously a source of the most profound feelings, feelings I can only guess at...mystical feelings." It is those "mystical feelings" that indicate the terrain which the traveler in The Locality Principle must finally navigate and which bring the book to its subtle but lovely conclusion.
The
Locality Principle is both winningly and disturbingly beautiful. With
Waldrop both extends and expands his extraordinary oeuvre in this deliciously
melancholy book where, in flawless prose and verse, the doubles we call
life and death, soul and body, soul and spirit are meticulously and lovingly
examined. Amid droll evolcations of daily life, the reader is seduced
into pleasures of speculation about a "(coherent) world" that is "entirely/confabulated,"
where "every sensation con/ceals a dream." The book supplies the additional
delight of Mrs. Crowe's fervent ghosts. Having held himself to (what we suppose is) a more or less factual account of life in his recent autobiography, Waldrop now questions the phemera of place and time. He writes of an observed and peopled garden to which there is no door, of encounters whose meaning is suspect; illumination in darkness. Throughout The Locality Principle, a remarkable and surprising book, we are alert to the metaphysical aspect of life; to an awareness of ghost tines. --Barbara Guest, author of Defensive Rapture and Selected Poems |
