ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS ASK
BY MEREDITH WALTERS
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Unlike the vast majority of her contemporaries, and very happily for us, Meredith Walters's linguistic imagination engages more frequently with the wonder of Art than with the narrower concerns of the Self. To enter her poems is to "tender your permission slip at the entrance of an enchanted universe." It's a seriously enchanted universe, informed by the poet's powerful engagement with art and painting and by fresh and imaginative aesthetic questioning. It's a place where everything is animated -- objects, ideas, questions -- a place where "even the spaces between questions call to you." Fortunately, the poet's instinct leads her to prioritize "first the songs, then the theories." The body, of course, being "an engine of song," it is natural that baths of sunlight, seeds that cling to your socks, bald eggs, congestion and aches make their appearance, alongside a variety of beguiling constructions such as dragonfly geometry and bellows pelagic.

These poems feel like the grandchildren of Stevens' poems. They descend straight through Ashbery but proclaim their unique character in their allegiance to the movement of physical instinct, "seaweed intuition," as she calls it, rather than dream logic. The poems slide by on a smoothly oiled bed of sand, roughly textured but at the same time silk. There is great good humor here, and wit, as well as the courage to "say happiness in a dark age." Above all, there is surprise and everywhere the exquisite development of metaphor, the true language of poetry.

After a CCD screening of Our Lady of Mt. Fatima,
Sister Immaculata asked me if I wanted to be angel
        when I died,
and I replied that I'd rather be an asteroid belt.

Through the lively poetic alchemy of All you have to do is ask, Meredith Walters has earned herself a place among those stars. -- Sidney Wade, contest judge

The poems of Meredith Walters are exquisite, musical, and full of emotional hints and subtle wisdom. She takes surrealism and wrings its neck. She takes NY and Language dogmas and goes on independently, supple and fresh. She treasures objects and makes them. She is a love poet, like Joe Ceravolo, where what is loved is thought itself. It's not for nothing that she has also worked as a carpenter: She knows how to unweave, too. Irresistble poetry. -- David Shapiro

Will you get answers? You'll get original poetry with real, imagined, and formerly surreal, but now actual, people, places, and things. Look out! Look up! Metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics masquerade as flying objects, detritus, flames, you name it, or rather, Ms. Walters does. These poems collude to pleasure and terrify readers, who will find themselves turning the pages of a three-dimensional world. Have fun! Beware! -- Jane Miller