The Surface
"I first encountered Laura Mullen’s poems in 1983, in an issue of the late lamented Ironwood. Their music sang itself to me for years; they made a model of what poetry should be and do, what I wanted my poetry to be. Those poems, and her first book, The Surface, published in 1991 as a National Poetry Series winner, embodied an almost perfect and perfectly precarious balance between what Charles Altieri calls lyricism and lucidity, enchantment and disenchantment: they walked open-eyed through the illusion, not taken in, but not willing to cast it aside either."
Reginald Shepherd