THE BEAUTS by Terri McCord

 

Through this tilted tumbler

glass, in a restaurant,

I view the moon,

see-through and magnified.

 

These lines that open Terri McCord’s poem Through and Through suggest her penchant for looking at the world from whatever quirky angle she can extemporize. How lucky we are that in this collection she shares with us her brilliant discoveries. Among her many skills, McCord is a master of startling transitions and stunning metaphors. These are poems that must be read again and again in order to fully appreciate all that lies beneath their initial charm. McCord’s new collection is, indeed, A Beaut.

–Cathy Smith Bowers

 

“Yes,/ my leitmotif is beauty/ beauty at every end,” writes Terri Lee McCord, but she doesn’t take us there by any of the usual routes, and what is revealed as beauty has little to do with what we might have expected it to be.  Elliptical, quietly intelligent, and charged with surprising perceptions, this collection is a stunner.

–Claire Bateman, Wonders of the Invisible World

 

Terri McCord is a painter as well as a poet, and I continue to be surprised and delighted by her visual imagination. She sees both clearly and deeply–as her words sometimes glimmer, sometimes flare, always illuminate. Like the artist she praises in “Believing Design,”

 

She has learned 

which strokes  which hues

 

faithfully coax the eye 

into believing  believing 

 

in permanence               of a kind. 

 

This is a lovely book.

–Gilbert Allen