🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕
“This is for whoever cores the poison apple, reeling
Seeds for a newborn forest, and for whoever waits
To clench, at those aged canopies,
God in the mist at dawn”
From the very first note, rapture, a fissure opening in my chest, as everything stills, and a lump, deep in my throat, begins to unfurl. This is something special. I’m here now, to absorb it, take what wants to come in, and for this moment, nothing else matters.
As this poet scatters images, words, a stream of not consciousness necessarily but feelings, (a sort of word art) that together weaves the most beautiful, unsettling, hopeful, and mysterious threads connecting us all – to love, to rebirth, to death, and most of all, to our substance, to nature, to things that are bigger than us all, and not at all understood (or at least, not rationally).
And here they are, collected in this volume. Not to be read with a rational mind, but to be absorbed. Poems, fragments and small narratives, all of them letting visceral images crowd in, as they tumble, unfolding, rushing out unchecked, in all their sensorial evocations, released through the conduit of this masterful poet.
Kids running wild in the bramble of their freedom; parents, childhood and youth; love beginning and its unbearably tenuous hold, everlasting in our memories; aging, we are always, aging; time rushing over us — past, present and future; the sky, the blue (thematically often, the blue), the starlight, the concrete beneath us.
Favorites I must call out include:
Ineffable; For the Child in Love; Unburied; and Years between.
“Poetry
A channel to gratitude, or a strange blue veil over death;
For you, follower of raindrops
To window corners, seeing in them a memory, sunlight,
Laughter, earth,
Body;
This small volume is to be cherished. I know this reader, for one, will let its strange and haunting fragments wash over days and nights that search for something more, again and again.
A great big thank you to the poet Jonathan Koven for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
