Poet and children's author Cynthia Zarin unveils her talents as a memoirist with the lyric essays of An Enlarged Heart. Zarin revels in her past: a tattered mink coat, paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, yellow stockings and all kinds of curtains are just a few of the objects that intermingle with reminiscences of her youth, her children and her sense of place in the world. Like a Mobius strip, Zarin begins in one spot and meanders, only to bring the reader back full circle by the end of the piece. She reminds us of the minutiae that fill our lives and have the capacity to bring us back to a precise moment in time, be it a sight, scent or sound.
Illness, eccentricity and national disaster all play key background roles as Zarin moves from one New York apartment to another or cavorts on the shores of Cape Cod and Sperlonga, Italy. With these narratives, the story is in the details, like the waiter who arrives one hot day with "a small silver cart with tiny wheels, and on the cart was a small Byzantine city of silver domes... underneath were their sandwiches, three slices of bread each, with the crusts cut off, festooned with toothpicks decorated with tiny streamers of green, yellow and red cellophane." Like the two scoops of chocolate ice cream delivered at that luncheon--"pale, faintly crystallized at the edges, in a just melted lake of paler cream"--Zarin's sentimental, poetic prose is best read slowly, so it can be savored. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer