Diane Tucker knows how a small detail becomes extraordinary. In The Sky Train she notes "a chapel of sunlight, slanted buttresses ... through the windows where it stains a shoulder bare and edged with gold along its biceps' black tattoo."; The poem turns out to be, among other things, about Sunday worship.
Scarves has an unusual Index. It lays out at a glance the thoughtful structure of the book. In addition to Prologue and Epilogue, the nine sections are points on the clock and the domestic tasks appointed to those Hours as well as the chronological progress of a life.
Starting with childhood memories, courtship, marriage, through her children's lives and ending in sleep, Tucker wrests songs from the repetitive notes of domestic life. Children playing at the beach are contrasted with the drowning of nuns on Hopkins' "The Deutschland."; Dragonflies are seen: "jewel shards...the breath of amethysts...shot-silk arrows and perfect narrow machinery.";
A surprising August Aurora strikes her "staring, standless as if lifted, dandled in a moonbright hand."; Speaking of hand, Tucker re -imagines Creation in a small wood fire and ends with "the first heat, unalloyed, that filled the skies but did not burn God's hand.";
There are some pieces in which the intensity of language could be hitched up a bit. Tucker is too casual about some details of the natural world; salmon bones are not quills, not even with a poet's license. Pen nibs, maybe, but not feathers.
In this, her second collection, Tucker struggles to live at peace domestically with the dragon of the inner poet. She forbids that power from plucking at her heart. Good thing he didn't comply. "... every pebble, every leaf, is a dragon sent to eat my juicy heart.";

[BCBW 2008]