Cold comfort

Natural Theology, Kelly Cherry's new collection of poems, has been published by Louisiana State University Press and caps a banner year for her, Yonah D. Karp reports. "Recently, she's been working on what she calls 'Madison fiction,'" Karp continues, and several of the UW-Madison creative writing program faculty member's recent stories - published by the likes of Iowa Review, Mademoiselle and Redbook - are set here. "Cherry sees time as the subject matter of literature," Karp writes, "and she particularly likes poetry because, she says, 'you explore human relation to time in the most musical of ways.'" Cherry wrote most of the book's poems in Madison, Minnesota, Latvia and England, 'all of them cold places,' she says. And as a result, there are plenty of icy and snowy images. And yet these are passionate poems: religious, erotic and uplifting." Now an emerita UW-Madison professor, Cherry lives on a small Virginia farm with her husband, the fiction writer Burke Davis III. She has published 17 volumes of fiction, essays, criticism and poems. Cherry's most recent book, Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems, was published last October by LSU Press.