Reviews

“How gratifying the act of restoration is in this musical, palpably intelligent book: gratifying in the range of what it chooses to ‘restore,’ from dance to dream to Freud’s Dora, and gratifying in the depth of its process. In Pugh’s precise and resonant poems, restoration includes both the acquisition and denial of matter. . . . How are we yoked to the airborne form, Pugh wonders, and it to us?  Restoration is the luminous answer.”

 —Linda Bierds, author of The Hardy Tree

“Christina Pugh’s Restoration is indeed an act of recovery and restoring.  In the midst of all our cultural noise and chaos, this book gives us keen, focused attention. . . replenishes us even with our losses, if we can summon, as Pugh does, the courage simply to respect feeling that is also thought and thought that is feeling.”

—Reginald Gibbons, author of Renditions

“Christina Pugh’s new collection Restoration is a stunning accomplishment. There is a discretion and lyric acuity to these poems, as well as an elegant intelligence, that resolve into startling and freshly earned wisdoms. Each precisely measured phrase reminds us that of all musics, it is the music of the mind that is most satisfying in poetry. Christina Pugh reveals the many ways the realm of dream inhabits and intersects our daily experience, as what in daylight might seem the most natural of observations is exposed as a new beginning in the dark, an unfolding to a greater meditation. Poised, restrained, and supremely confident, this is a truly notable volume of poems.”

—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

“Freud is everywhere in this gorgeous volume of poems: in the twenty-seven species of ‘Dream Work,’ in the extended meditation on Dora, one of the doctor’s most famous patients, and, consummately, in the poems that favor the formal rather than the thematic legacy.  For Freud was, first and foremost, one of the twentieth-century’s great poetic readers; he taught us, anew, the semantic power of form: inversion, omission, metonymy, repetition, all the repositories of meaning. Christina Pugh’s considerable brilliance is to capture these insights for the lyric poem. No other recent work I know exhibits such a gift for simultaneous justness and surprise, for pleasures of the fresh-built analogy.  What’s restored in Restoration is our felt attachment to the world.”

—Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy

“There are truly breathtaking poems in this humanly rich and reflective book—it abounds in microcosms of imagery and words which are scrupulously invested by the poet with a sort of musical perfectionism.  The shifts between one passage and another, one poem and another, are startlingly vivid and enlightening.  A book to read and reread, whose sound-symphonies, language, and rhythms will linger long in my memory.”

—Anne Winters, author of The Displaced of Capital

“"[A]n elegant, intimate, and melodious ‘journey in a circle’ . . . It combines a confessional poet’s personality with a Language poet’s anxiety about the written word, a romantic’s insistence on self with a postmodernist’s sense of fracture, and an imagist’s attention to detail with the metaphorist’s imaginative freedom. In this way, Pugh addresses the aesthetic concerns of her day while also surpassing them.”

—Jennifer Banks, editor at Yale University Press and author of Natality: Toward A Philosophy of Birth

“Don’t let the time stamp (‘September 2001’) at the bottom of the first poem in Christina Pugh’s intelligent, compelling second volume, Restoration, mislead you. Pugh’s book makes no explicit mention of the events of 9/11. Instead, she references that period in much the same way that Virginia Woolf acknowledged ‘December 1910’: namely, as the approximate point at which ‘human character changed.’ Restoration unfolds in the aftermath of such change. Pugh’s sharp psychological investigations mingle pronouns whose referents remain hauntingly unspecified, with uncanny, vivid imagery (‘a stand of iris rises as an island in the grass’), creating a gently surreal, dream-bound, ‘crepuscular’ world. Her speakers (one of whom toys with Wordsworth’s words in the bold ‘I Had No Human Fears’) challenge the concept of personhood: ‘I need // to leave myself: // imagine me / alive, with no sentience.’ Like ‘the doctor’ in the book’s centerpiece—the tremendous twelve-part poem ‘Notes for Dora,’ based on Freud’s famed patient—who ‘pried each noun / from its casing, / so the pearl eardrops trembled free,’ Pugh strips the skin of habit and familiarity from her subjects, transforming each into something luminous and new.”

—Sumita Chakraborty, Boston Review

“If restoration is, according to Nietzsche, an act of revenge, then Christina Pugh in her second book enacts vengeance that seems devoid of fear, primarily because the object of this vengeance remains a mystery, beyond narrative construction. Pugh’s Restoration: Poems defies and resists, as well as exposes, our Pavlovian desires for the explicatory and the voyeuristic. This is a restoration ‘free of the X-ray’s zoom,’ if by X-rays she means the fleshing out of telling. Instead, Pugh’s Restoration sublimates revenge into a language that is the ‘densest vessel’ for one’s words, where one returns to a previous dwelling, over and over, until a lyric, a song, is what remains. . . . The more poems one reads in this book, the more one rereads the poems; the more one embraces the pleasure and wisdom Pugh asks us to engage in. ‘Let’s not ask how it was made– / this swan in a blue window, / swimming in snow. It’s the word beneath / that moves me most.’”

—Fady Joudah, Ploughshares, in “Recommended Books”