Little Soul and the Selves

How does a spirit new to the world, baffled by the family domain and its customs, but above all curious, come to discover its essence? What does any child carry into the present from ancestors whose histories have been assimilated and long forgotten? These are among the questions poet Leslie Ullman explores in her sixth collection, as she re-invents the various selves that make up a person and then imagines how they might answer. In the process, what at first appears to be a chronicle of a mid-century childhood through coming of age to maturity becomes an interrogation of the very nature of the soul—its origins, its purpose, its evolution in a given lifetime. To this end, the persona of Little Soul muses at the heart of the search. Introduced as a half-wild creature unbound by maleness or femaleness, tentative and weightless as “a lone firefly lacing the dusk,” Little Soul at first flounders alongside the untried Selves but eventually comes to instruct and fuse with them. Sometimes humorous and gently satirical in their depictions of a middle-class America whose values seemed unassailable for a time, these poems ultimately reconstruct a personal history as they mull over the universal burdens of self-doubt, ambition, desire, disappointmen,t and inevitable relinquishments, and then begin to taste the pleasures of traveling light.