On Looking

May 29, 2006
Looking, Purpura writes, is a way of paying attention; it is an almost spiritual practice, and it was "the sole practice I had available to me as a child." In these 18 pieces, the essayist (Increase
) looks at colors (brown and red seem to be favorites), at shape and time, at dead bodies, weather, fear. The most trenchant essay muses about women being seen. These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics. Purpura describes single objects beautifully: Chinese lanterns are "those orange, papery pods gone lacy in fall, with a dim, silver berry burning inside." Though her putative topic is the visual, Purpura also ponders language, explaining word games and playing with the precision of diction (which verb best describes the things you do to drapes, she wonders: do you draw them, shut them or pull them?). Indeed, Purpura's prose is sometimes a tad too opaque: "If I can call the pin image, memento, moment suspended,
then the whole northeastern Ohio sky draws close...." This slim volume requires careful, slow parsing, but readers who persevere will be rewarded with Purpura's deep intelligence.

August 1, 2006
Purpura, a poet and a poetic essayist whose work has garnered a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright, and a Pushcart Prize, puts readers into a state of aesthetic arrest as well as surprise, discomfort, and meditative pleasure via her pristine, radiant, and unflinching collagelike essays. Lest one think all is pretty and safe, she begins by witnessing autopsies and reporting on the unsettling beauty of what's hidden in life and exposed in death. Purpura also gazes intently, curiously, kindly, and sensuously at deformities, striving to be "like a child, neither moral nor immoral." She gazes at snow and thinks about glaciers, expresses the gratitude for simple things felt by those who have suffered pain and injury, and considers the resonance of a Faberge egg and a calf's jawbone. With grace, candor, and restraint, Purpura muses over what catches the eye and why, the sensation of being seen, the nature of invisibility, and the act of looking away. But most of all, she looks to connection and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)