Tornado

Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that ‘glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.’ –Alicia Ostriker

Ted Lardner enlarges our range of wonder. For him, the task is to bring the jolt of another world to us by showing us that a springtime apple tree is ‘a brain in flower’ that comes to us ‘from the other side of human language.’ Each line of Tornado sends out a beam that flashes in the line then bounces like sonar in the reader’s deeper parts where we keep our beloved dead… . It’s as if Lardner did not write on a keyboard but with a typewriter ball with images, not letters. The ‘tornado’ is his image for leaving, for an ‘intersection’ where the living pass beyond the visible yet begin the Orphic need for imagination. At the center of this vortex Ted Lardner creates the space where the dead still have their Being and make their Rilkean demand that we change our lives. This is a wonderful book. –Bill Tremblay