When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its
rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

- Stephen Spender

The poem “Spring Snow” is an exquisite piece, evoking nature with clean precision;

     Behold

a six-hour wonder: six
new inches bedecking the

railing, the bench, the top
he circular table like

a risen cake.

“The Burning of Madrid as Seen from the Terrace of My House,” based on a retrospective exhibition of the sculptor Juan Munoz, is a poem that has movement and ends with the lines

     Won’t

the stagehands be surprised when they return

from break.
You see the little balconies?

How easily they burn?

Gregerson gives us her unique insights into the world we inhabit; she’s a writer whose thinking goes into the deeper waters of the ocean that is the mind.

The writing in the poem “Father Mercy, Mother Tongue” is so strong you can taste the words, as the author speaks of 1935 and the ‘Red bowl of dust,’ how this dust settled everywhere…

     The sugarbowl
was red with it, the very words we spoke

   were dirt.

Magnetic North is a book that requires repeated readings so that the intricacies and complexity of construction can reveal itself …here a little, there a little.

There is virtue in patience, and good things come to those who wait, and wait upon, this book of poems which slowly reveals itself with each reading.