Raymond-Jean Frontain

Galileo’s Spyglass

Arts & Literature

“McDowell’s title poem narrating Galileo’s labors to perfect the lenses that ‘magnified his vision twenty, thirty / times normal sight’ and allow him to watch ‘the endless, unfolding, comingling light,’ is the controlling metaphor for McDowell’s own honing a craft that allows him to appreciate the radiant significance inherent in quotidian experience. I am particularly taken with his several poems of loss that manifest what Tagore calls ‘the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain.’”