Free verse sonnets, haiku-like poems ranging from seven down to a single line, and prose poems with as much elegant lyricism as any sonnet, Tate's Hillary Gravendyk Prize-winning, full-length debut sets a recursive cast of forms waltzing across its pages. These poems exhibit a subtle music and rich cinematic verité of imagery in which small bursts of color (in the senses both art and music give the word) suddenly stun, the reader drawn so closely into its intimate world that a long-held breath released might startle. This book is marked by a quiet intensity of affect and sensation, intertwining the two so closely it's hard to tell where one leaves off and the other takes hold. These poems manifest the lived bodily experience of the speaker and in turn take hold of their readers, through all five senses, bodily.
     The deftly captured images in this book bring to mind the Dutch still life masters, the intimate photorealist strain of Gerhard Richter's work, and the cinema of a Chantal Ackerman or Agnes Varda, in the visual arena. The combination of that rich imagery with exquisite music and delicate formal structures reminds me a bit of Marianne Moore, along with so many others. The language play of the everyday has evident forerunners in such writers as Gertrude Stein and Bernadette Mayer. Proust also pops not just because Tate tells us in an afterword À la recherche was a direct source for a bit of the language. The maker of the famous madeleine (as literary figure) has imparted to Tate more than a few plant names and titles. All of her influences have been fully absorbed and made the poet's own in that way in which the best writers devour and transform their literary DNA. Turn to any page for an example of small moments replete with condensations of metaphor and lined with layers of emotional resonance. Perhaps a few isolated lines will best illustrate it:

I follow her gaze to the engraved steeple, bricked with birds' nests. (13)

Pussy willow twig tapping the skylight above my childhood bed. (10)

Heavy hollow branch he thumped / on playground paving / and pill bugs / spilled / so many wriggling (60)

A wasp hovers over the family of grasses. Unlike the bee who stings only once. (48)

O palest glistening chrysalis green. (6)

In addition to its rich imagery and sonorousness (especially its gleaming consonance and internal rhyme), it is also extremely tactile. We feel the "silk scarf tossed over a bare shoulder," how the bruised lip "hurts a little," while "repeating 'gentle'" to her child, feel "his palm along [her] cheek," just as we twinge at the "pinch of small teeth" on the feeding nipple (26, 19, 61). Even taste and smell come into play, the world rushing in at every angle. "Pierce with thumbnail the perfumed navel of a clementine," for instance, or the "[i]tch to drink milky black tea, bitter pale (73, 6).
Thematically, as formally and sensorially, the book swirls its modes and moods, inmixing ode and elegy, meditation and mourning, joy and anguish. Tate opens with one of the poems I feel it's more accurate to call small rather than "short," small bodies with vast souls:

For the Colors
of a New Place

White agate     goldenrod
now walk ahead
             hear daughter cry
shrill thread                 I want to dye
all yellow

One sees the bursts of color, feels the maternal longing to retint her daughter's protesting screams the sunny yellow of contentment. But we can't help also hear—see, jutting to the right, thrown across that gap of whitespace interior to the line—the homophonically veiled and expressed wish to "die" (which is perhaps a reversal of a wish to erase the child in that tense moment) that marks a parents' utter exhaustion and frustration in the face of a toddler's meltdown.
     But it's only after reading further that we feel the full punch of that slippage. The seemingly empty grief of the irrational toddler mistaking minor discomfort for lethal threat will resonate with the speaker's immeasurable mourning in the face of the arbitrary fate of suffering miscarriages, just as the word dye/die holds overdetermined associations with those losses and, perhaps, even the speaker's consequent feelings of despair. This knowledge comes with "News Known / Sooner Abroad" and its revelation that her "doctor saw first…. Small, she said. There's a heartbeat. Slow. Too slow. Dragged a measure across the screen. Too small" (7). 
     The poet thankfully avoids the too-familiar and simplistic tactic of making her children the tokens of some sentimental perfect victory and fantasy-fulfilling denouement of the heteropatriarchal drama of Family and Womanhood—realistic parental ambivalence, as above, is noted more than once—and instead of a linear path to "Completion," Tate sends the whorl of complex emotions and multilayered experiences involved both in losing and raising children chasing one another around, the parallel multiverses of the lived and unlived lives we all carry with us. As she notes in one of the sonnets, "Sweet Tea," the speaker well into one of her pregnancies,

A single changed event would mean a different child
Unfurling inside where that heart grew and stilled,
So each small spoilage, broken ankle, burnt apple caramel,
I decide to read as choreography, what led to this. (11)

Such loss ripples the pages of The Silk the Moths Ignore as "sweet tea flutters [the fetus inside her], swimming in sugar water," but without ever coming close to overwhelming it. For another key facet of the parental experience that we see in this book is the joy taken in comforting the upset tot, the unintentional poetry of their language acquisition, the touch of their skin and the ever-awakening perceptions and expanding selves in engagement with the particulars of what for them is a more and more crystallizing world (both inside and outside the book: the cover art is a detail of her daughter's rather impressive toddler-era watercolor painting.) Take this beautiful moment of sensual pleasure and sibling generosity, which could easily have fallen to sentimentality in lesser hands but is held firmly back by this poet's impeccable sense of balance and measure (as its title happens to evince):

To See Both Sides

Ungentle elbow
against her         still
                   he bites
          the grape
and feeds his sister half (32)

How much of human nature and possibility are woven into these short lines, this small moment of ego-driven aggressivity countered with selfless sharing? These little odes throughout are wondrously revelatory in and of themselves, but they take on so much more outsized force in context of the whole. Our lives all are punctuated by daily pleasures and lingering traumas, are marked by life-changing happenstance and the choices we make in response to them.
     It should be noted, as well, how moving the formal operations of these poems are, weighted with all the emotion of those miscarriages and the nurturing of children she went on to birth. We feel these small poems build dikes against the grief, floodwalls of margins holding back, holding up, from both sides. It's why "he" aligns under "her," setting a new left-hand margin for an instant. It's at work in the right-hand limit the line "hear daughter cry" makes in concert with "goldenrod" (in "For the Colors / of a New Place," above) and to which "I wish I could dye" could have conformed but notably breaks. We see this in all of the "smally vast" poems in the book, and it comes to echo in all of the formal structures Tate employs, from the rhyming couplets embedded in the prose of "An Empty Measure in Music" to sonnets like "Umbilical" and "Bruised Peaches."
     In this absolutely gorgeous poetry, Bronwen Tate shows us how to make what one can out of whatever we're able to rip away from Fate's grubby hands. This is the kind of book that not only offers us the greatest pleasures artful language possibly can; it's one of those rare artworks, despite (or partly enabled by) its great humility, that teaches us all a little about living a life that is, as all our lives are, marked by limit and loss. It shows us the kind of grace we can only bestow upon ourselves through the mindful making (dinners, poems, relationships, gardens, scarves…) of an embodied mind attentive to those luminous details of our everyday lives. It teaches us that we can compensate for loss (even as it will always remain outstanding), redirect our disappointment, and salve our suffering with nothing more—and nothing less—than our most fundamental creative capacities as human animals, directly engaged with our senses and attuned even to the most difficult of emotions, to make a livable life, day by day, moment to moment. "Knit the silk the moths ignore," she implores us in one poem, for, as she writes in another, "Making makes / More." (70, 74)