Recarving the Chrysoprase Bowl: The Book of Gates

Only now is the scope and breadth of McGauley’s work in poetry visible in published form ... Recarving the Chrysoprase Bowl is a work of poems in sequence, each with its morning that is neither poised in apartness, nor self-entangled in the verbal undergrowth of the others. The sequence is cumulative, building up its images, landscapes, names, sites, and settings, one at a time. Though there is no plot to follow, there is a dense fabric of reiterated language-actions and verbal patterns to take in and move through, whether one reads deeply, for motifs and allusions, or for the surface effects in the which the poetry has its profoundest life: its rhythms, sound-textures, derangements of syntax, and acoustic concretions. - from the Afterword.