Abstract

Between Heaven and Earth is a collection of poems which is informed by the theory of the geometry of configurated energy. The collection opens with a prologue in the voice of the persona of Jane. She is a middle-aged housewife, married for more than 20 years to her husband, Tom. Both have lived the majority of their lives on a farm located in the far reaches of middle America during the 1950s. Jane and Tom are on the verge of bankruptcy---in three months they will lose the farm, which has been in Tom's family since the turn of the century. As the book opens, Jane is in the throes of a near-death experience brought on by a heart attack. This single moment sustains the entire collection of poems as she "dips" in and out of other spiritual and psychological realities. As she travels in this twilight state---that place somewhere between life and death, here and now, there and then---she encounters other major personae: Pica, Tomas and Esther are also on their own spiritual and emotional journeys. The theory of the geometry of configurated energy, which informs the collection, uses as a point of departure Gerard Manley Hopkins' views on inscape and instress. The theory suggests that a poem's inscape and instress are informed by the law of association of ideas, as put forth by Samuel T. Coleridge, and that this interaction produces a distinctive and discernable energy pattern in the poem. Moreover, the final effect of these elements can be perceived in geometric energy figures which shape the very nature of the inscape and instress. Ultimately, the theory can be extended to its logical conclusion: if a poem shapes---and is shaped by---the interaction of meaning and poetic technique, then the final effect might be the shaping of perception. This last consequence is significant if one believes not only that poetry has the power to shape perception but that perception shapes behavior, and, thus, reality itself