Book of the Day: The Body & the Day by Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara's The Body & the Day is a book best described as teeming. McNamara's close, detailed descriptions of the natural world, briskly rendered in dense free verse, reward the reader's patience.

Consider "Dahlias":

Dahlias

They arrive on my desk, a clear demonstrative bunch
prickly and blood-red, passion's messengers

even without your note -- three years ago when
dahlias were in bloom -- making the room stand back,

and the little of everything on the mantel, sweet pea
and freesia, larkspur, bristly mourning bride

rooted in a single thickness of glass stones.
The flowers bell like balls in a Galton board, figures

of chance, the rain stopping, sun glancing off
the gilded slope of a pagoda, its reach released in cloud.

And in the garden, a fat bee humming in the trumpet
of a squash flower fumbles with information like a god.

The strong declarative rhythm of these lines--"a fat bee humming in the trumpet/of a squash flower fumbles"--is emblematic of the propulsive energy of McNamara's work.

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