Turbulence by Quincy Whitney

Quincy Whitney celebrates the intersection of science and the arts, as in her poem about Vermeer’s camera obscura: “Vermeer possessed a second set of eyes!” Many of the strongest poems turn her gaze on her formative relationship with her twin sister. Her gorgeous poem “Onion Moon,” written in response to the sudden loss of her husband, speaks of peeling away “the constant motion of a summer’s day” to reveal the darkness of the night. Whitney’s poems originate in questions, and one question leads to the next. She makes of her art a scalpel to see beneath the surface of things, to explore the nature of reality itself—“what this moment holds / where it points as it unfolds.”
–Alfred Nicol, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award

Quincy Whitney has brought her considerable powers of observation, her fascination with the intersection of science and art, and a deep compassion for the beauties and challenges of the turbulences that buffet all of us, to finding the words and the cadences to ride and often calm them. While Science cannot predict how rapids flow, she investigates the eddies where natural, emotional and metaphysical currents converge. In the end Turbulence has its own luminous glow and it shines through these remarkable poems.
–Marie Harris, New Hampshire Poet Laureate (1999-2004)

“Is silence turbulence, prayer, or the music of forgetting?” Questions become deeper and more insistent as the viewer moves from the natural world to the shifting versions of that world composed, with vivid, gorgeous imagery and subtle music, by the scientist, the artist, the lover, the philosopher questioning his own meaning and place in the world. Science shows us the “Black Hole.” “Onion Moon” moves the poet to pray. The violinmaker manipulates Time to hold it still. The twin, that mirror-image, becomes the threat of loss in every human relationship, the unity we fear, long for, and are forever denied.”
–Rhina P. Espaillat, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry; the Richard Wilbur Award; Howard Nemerov Prize; May Sarton Award; and the Robert Frost “Tree at My Window” Prize for translation