To See the Earth

Author: Philip Metres

Publisher: Cleveland State University Press (2008)

To See the Earth navigates the increasingly turbulent waters of a globalized world from Moscow to Chicago, from Philadelphia to Ramallah. In poems haunted by Anna Akhmatova, Robert Lowell, and Lev Rubinstein, Metres renders in vivid language what Fredric Jameson called cognitive mapping a kind of situational representation on the part of the individual subject to the vaster and properly unrepresentable totality. To See the Earth travels to Russia, memorializes immigrant Arab American family life in a Brooklyn brownstone, witnesses to the violence visited upon people both at home and abroad, and carves out of such losses images of hope the birthing not of a terrible beauty, but of the dreaming disarmed body.