This is a book of reverent looking that defies the edges of things.
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Closer is an examination of the act of looking itself—of looking at the world, of looking at time, and, ultimately, of looking at ourselves. At its centre are two sequences that offer the longest gaze: on 18th century botanist Ellen Hutchins and her passionate but tragic career working on Ireland’s remote west coast, and on a single photograph secretly taken by M. M. Grossman in a Polish ghetto during World War II. Intercut with Hutchins’ own drawings of seaweed, these wide sweeps through time and voice are framed by more intimate pieces of seeing and, inevitably, failing to see. Using tools of erasure, ekphrasis, and microscopy, Clare Goulet manages an astonishing feat of attention.
“Dip your hand in the sea./We are none of us ever alone,” Goulet writes in Closer. This book is science moored to wonder. Closer reads like a wrack line; poems that tenderly observe what the sea’s cast out—lost boys, cranes, a botanist’s letters, a single droplet of distilled water on a slide, pencil shavings—with wonder and exactitude.
This is a book of reverent looking that defies the edges of things. Closer is like opening a forgotten specimen drawer, finding a pin in an animal, pulling that pin out and—miraculously—the creature flies away.
—Jessica Hiemstra, artist & writer
