White Stone: The Alice Poems

These evocative poems move from the icon of Alice in Wonderland to the imagined figure of Alice out of Wonderland—on a Vancouver beach with the poet, underground with Persephone, in Memphis with Elvis. But first they explore the life of the real Alice Liddell (1852–1934), who sat still for Charles Dodgson's camera and inspired the Alice books that prompted his rise to fame as Lewis Carroll. In this powerful sequence, the emotional life of Alice Liddell as girl and woman is depicted in brilliant narrative juxtapositions. Presented is Alice the creation and Alice the person in a cultural context that, on one level, reexamines cognition and dissociation and on another, liberates the poetic sequence from the monotony of story and closure.