The Diamond Dog
The Diamond Dog, Diane Wakoski s 19th collection, calls into being a world where the scientific and the mytho-poetic interact and combine. Here, in her first collection of entirely new work since Argonaut Rose (1998), planets move in the perturbed ellipses of warped, Einsteinian space. Yet too, in the realm of the Diamond Dog, stars still turn in their Ptolemaic spheres. Here, the air can be Linden green, Lorca green, and the stem of a carnation can be the line on an astronomer s spectrograph, the signature of oxygen in some distant star.  Though these intricately-written poems chase outward across innumerable landscapes the streets of New York City, the glacier fields north of Juneau, a kitchen on the day of a dinner party, a collapsed star made entirely of diamond, the island of Crete, the kingdom of Colchis, Plato s cave, a Midwestern college campus, an empty avenue on an afternoon in Majorca everything about these poems pulls back toward a center, toward crystal packed into point. It is a story of separation, absence, and of the Diamond Dog itself, an emissary, searching out what has been lost to the poet. --Anhinga PressDiane Wakoski's poetry has always put me in touch with the original and fresh and mysterious lyric impulse I felt when I read her work for the first time 40 years ago. I have re-experienced this awakening with every book of hers, and once again with The Diamond Dog. --Mark Jarman