Diane Lockward, more than any other poet now writing, exemplifies Garcia Lorca's definition of poet as the professor of the five bodily senses. She revels in sensory language, often lip-smacking language, and she can make the language of terror and loss as spine-tingling as the beauty of a last stab of sunset before it disappears. The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, with its cryptic title, invites us to join her in nothing less than a poetic banquet where we are seduced by the "Red of the raspberry, its drupelets a nest of sexual seeds, / and the music, pepper hot and red," or challenged by the never-ending unwinding of Lockward's interior landscape seeking its exterior expression in the physical world around her: "I build a nest of silken floss / and tiny twigs, / watch the lives on the other side."
