<em>Even in a state of geometrical grace we cannot see time as it is, only as itpasses. So the river shows us while softly disfiguring our waterlogged bodieson the way to vast projects of war.</em>&mdash;Rosmarie Waldrop <br /><br /><em>Driven to Abstraction</em> is Rosmarie Waldrop&rsquo;s sixth collection of poetry with NewDirections. The first of its two sections, &ldquo;Sway-Backed Powerlines,&rdquo; consistsof five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyagesof discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music ofJohn Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction ofzero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary moneyin economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, andwritten in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop&rsquo;s mostengaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the heightof her creative powers.