Encryptions

The elegy, the ode—these are among the great modes of poetry, and one can readily situate the work published here in relation to them. Certainly Ted Pearson’s magnificent Encryptions is affectively elegiac and formally comparable to an ode. But if there were a mode of poetry properly called the commitment, this book would be its masterwork. As the fourth and final volume of a project (The Tune’s Image) that’s been some 30 years in the making, it is a demonstration of sustained, impassioned care. Encryptions unfolds in three movements, three series, following trajectories so ardently motivated by love of what should be the good (in life, as in poetry) as to lift the language into the sphere of pure music, sheer meaningfulness. — Lyn Hejinian