By Katherine Towers
September 2010
Picador
Distributed by the Trans-Atlantic Publications
ISBN: 9780330511599
44 Pages
$18.95 Paper original
Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers' poems, exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, or the grace-notes of memory.
Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.