My Back Pages

Like Wordsworth's Lucy, Floyd Collins' the Teresa of My Back Pages is memory and wound. Like Poe's Ligeia, she is myth and muse. Teresa is also flesh and blood, a woman with whom Collins had a brief but intense relationship a half-century ago, who gave his world color and texture, then animated it before disappearing into the future. She exists now in poems that are precise and allusive in their conjuring of one whose name becomes "a byword for all things of beauty and grace." Collins, who has written a book on Seamus Heaney and numerous essay-reviews on contemporary poetry for The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, and The Kenyon Review, takes his rightful place among our most affective poets with this lyrical sequence: "From the ruck and maul of our humanity... / we rise incorruptible."