Go Figure

Go Figure

In Go Figure , Carol Moldaw demonstrates an incandescent mastery of figuration in its many forms. As the title suggests, these poems invite readers to draw their own conclusions. Observing, inquiring, and delving, Moldaw brings the intertwined strands of life and art to light at their most intimate. A wife-muse who interrogates the role, a mother hard-pressed by motherhood, a daughter whose own mother’s decline causes her to probe their connection, and an artist with an exacting eye and ear who contemplates the creative mysteries, Moldaw is driven to understand and articulate the self in all its manifestations. Like a skater cutting first lines in ice, Moldaw displays lyric immediacy and lyric expanse in her poems with an unswerving command. Complex and inviting, with deft wit, the poems engage public and private life and voice a necessary and resounding affirmation of the feminine and of language emerging through silence. In one of her unpublished essays, Elizabeth Bishop wrote, “The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery.” These three essential characteristics are all fully present and perfectly balanced in the poems of Carol Moldaw’s dazzling new book Go Figure . The precision of phrasing and keen focus of the imagery—the sense that every word has been weighed for its heft and sonic effects—dovetails with an openness to what might happen intuitively during the writing process, resulting in surprising turns that expand and deepen poem after poem. One of the thematic throughlines of the book traces the process of unlearning and self-discovery in the speaker’s quest to find an authentic voice and unique sensibility through which the poems are conveyed and refracted, as through a prism, at unexpected angles that make us feel more intensely and see the world more vividly.  —Jeffrey Harrison Go Figure is the work of a deeply intelligent poet with a physical grasp on language. Everything Moldaw’s eye falls on takes on a beautiful, biting clarity. Her straightforward lines demonstrate both lyric intensity and tonal sensitivity: a fierce capacity for finding the emotional heart of things. There is a voice in this voice. You want to follow this mind at work wherever it turns. Poems about art and the making of art populate this collection, but overall, Go Figure is grounded in the textures of human relationship and the truths of a closely observed life. Small occurrences, clear sentences. And underneath, immense depths.  —Jenny George Carol Moldaw’s poems are equally cerebral and sensuous, candid and inquisitive. She has perfected a warm tone that invites you to keep coming back just to be in her intelligent company. I felt less alone while reading her on marriage; on being (and having) a muse; on memory and aging; on loving landscapes and wildlife. Citing Elizabeth Bishop’s propensity ‘to double-check, / to verify (or correct) her notion / about which way a goat’s eye slits run, / across or up and down,” Moldaw places herself appositely in that poetic lineage of meticulous observation, subtly tinted feeling. Go Figure is a wonderful book. —Ange Mlinko The fierceness of the love in these poems, and the lithe music of it, is part of what makes them powerful. Love for a child, love for dying elders, love for the burning world where “Bear scat gums the long grass,” where “the apricot bears fruit,” a world where “inside  windswept  is  wept .” Part of the moral fire in the work is environmentally minded. Part of it is addressed to a sexist literary and artistic world. And the strange beauty of these poems is in the ease of the forms—their presence often muted, elegantly and artfully—which means you for a moment forget the harder truths they are confronting you with. Watching a plover with a group of friends, the voice in the poem speaks of one friend who “channels everything—rage, / fear, grief—into wall-scale / drawings precise as etchings.” These poems do something like the reverse: They take what is vast and gather it in brief poems that channel everything, precisely. -- Jesse Nathan ― McSweeney's Published On: 2025-01-07 Carol Moldaw is the author of six previous books of poetry: Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018); So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2010); The Lightning Field , 2002 winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize (Oberlin College Press, 2003); Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001), also translated into Turkish and published in a bilingual edition in Istanbul (Iyi Seyler, 1998); Chalkmarks on Stone (La Alameda Press, 1998); and Taken from the River (Alef Books, 1993). She is also the author of a novella, The Widening (Etruscan Press, 2008). She has received a Merwin Conservancy Artist Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals as The