The Feast Delayed
To undergo metamorphosis is to change form by natural, supernatural, or, in the case of the poems in Diane LeBlanc’s The Feast Delayed, poetic means. It is to eat death on the roadside. To assemble a widow’s kit with a corkscrew and a silver bowl of ash. Over and over, in strange and exacting metaphors, the poet reconsolidates grief into something cavernous and sometimes kind: “In a world sinking under the weight of a caged blue fox, / wind borrows an umbrella and returns a wet petunia.” It is one thing to find poignancy in roses or moonlight. It is quite another to discover it in a mannequin, the burning of Notre Dame, an albino snake, a truck loaded with ears of corn, and the placing of a phonograph arm in a record’s grooves. These poems find a way into my deepest ear, sibyl-like, offering beauty, humor, drama, and, yes, consolation. — Melissa Kwasny
