By Ann Fisher-Wirth
Art is at work throughout Ann Fisher-Wirth’s second full-length book. The collection is brilliantly framed by the two halves of “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” a long poem about a work of art dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Fisher-Wirth steps into the scroll and leads us on an imaginative journey across its terrain. Thus we move into the twin worlds of Art and the Past. The second of seven sections contains “The Trinket Poems,” fearless and fascinating poems about a little-known Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Mutilated,” in which Fisher-Wirth played the role of Trinket. In the poems, she mixes her character’s life with her own as daughter, wife, mother, teacher, actor. By putting the spotlight on the various roles she plays, both on- and offstage, she sketches in the intersection between art and life and suggests that we are destined to replay the past again and again.