First

The poems inFirst, Arleen Par's seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings.

This layered evocation of the past--of childhood in 1950s Dorval, "a green mesh of girls friendships and fights"--and the intensity of the desire to know, giveFirstits haunting beauty. "[T]he word though old fashioned," Par writes, "iswhence. . . unconditioned origins" when "no worthy question is ever answered on the same plane that it was asked; how to frame the question not knowing the plane on which I must ask it." (From Brick Books)