Error and angels
Subtitle: poems
By: by Maureen Bloomfield.
Series: The James Dickey contemporary poetry series
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Columbia, S.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 59
Description: To err is to wander, and the speaker of Maureen Bloomfield's Error and Angels wakes to find that she has strayed, like Dante's traveler, from the path whose end is light. Voices from her Catholic school days, figures from the Judaeo-Christian mythos, and fragments from the history of art inform her ironic, iconic quest.

Invoking Iphigenia, Sarah, Mary, Magdalen, Giuliana, and others, she questions the confluences in women's lives between renunciation and fertility, beauty and its abnegation - acts and attributes whose ramifications imply a provisional, deleterious kind of power.

Bloomfield writes of shifting landscapes - London, Paris, the American Midwest, Florida, Florence. These places align the interior and exterior mirrors as she inspects the conjunction between fate and folly, misapprehension and mistake. At the heart of these poems is the mystery of language as it demonstrates the exigencies of good will and of grace.