NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Michael Hettich.

John Balaban is one of the finest poets of his generation, and indeed one of the best poets at work today. When I say “fine,” I mean just that: his poetry communicates a discernment of eye and ear attuned to nuance, subtle variation, and the truths embedded therein. These qualities, coupled with a rare intelligence, a deeply-informed worldview, and a resistance to navel-gazing or rhetorical pomposity, combine to invest his work with a Classical tenor that has the clarity of good prose and the heft of well-made poetry. As with all of his previous books of poetry and prose, his new book, Empires, is an engaging, invigorating, expertly-crafted collection that manages to speak simultaneously to and of our time as well as of the great span of history that has brought us to this moment. Continue reading “The World at Large”

Guest Post by Chloe Yelena Miller.

Naomi Thiers splits her poetry book, Made of Air, into two sections, Ordinary Women and Made of Air. The first half of the poems are dedicated to specific women, but a feminine presence is strong in the second half, through the narrator or, often, “she.” The poem, “Old People Waking,” ends with the lines, “And if everything hurts, it means / the current’s flowing; we hiss inside: / Life. Live.” This is the book’s message in a stanza: feel and acknowledge the pain and keep living.

The female narrator’s awareness of age centers on her own years lived, as she remains every age she has been. She ends the poem, “The Pearl” with the line, “For I feel my own 16-year-old inside, humming / eager, terrified—real as the slow / rain of wild and gentle losses.” Aging women aren’t often seen, but here, the narrator centers them in the poem’s scenes.

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Made of Air by Naomi Thiers. Kelsay Books, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C.

Guest Post by Michael Hettich.

Denusha Laméris’s Bonfire Opera, a book of surprising, deeply moving personal lyrics, is a stellar example of what’s best in contemporary mainstream American poetry. Published in the ever-more-impressive and various Pitt Poetry Series, the poems in this book are masterfully crafted, emotionally challenging, and accessible—capable of speaking powerfully to both poets and general readers alike. While her poems break no new ground, the news Laméris brings us is intimate, timely, and often profoundly revelatory. Continue reading “Of Love and Revelation”

Guest Post by Scudder H. Parker.

Opening Eva Zimet’s first book of poetry The Lost Grip makes the reader feel drawn unexpectedly into a Tango lesson offered by a skilled instructor who is also a Zen master.

You can’t stand back and watch. Your hand has been taken; an arm touches your back lightly; you are drawn onto the floor. You feel the pain the writer has known, but you are not allowed to step back and offer comfort. You must feel and share it in the dance.

This delicate, piercing volume sometimes confides, sometimes spins you around, sometimes tugs you back in close, sometimes pauses and stands there with you waiting.

In “A Dreamspace For All of Us,” Zimet writes: “I dreamed of a space for us / any of us, all of us.” But instead of some comfortable, welcoming home, she concludes:

The floor is wide-planked and smooth.
The space is otherwise empty.
I sleep against the wall.
Daniel also slept by the wall in a studio, and he survived.
We are the most intimate, in that.

The book is haunted by violence and the struggle to recover trust and intimacy.  Sometimes it is brusque and almost protective in tone. In “Risk,” Zimet writes: “I wanted to share the freefall of intimacy / with you. Didn’t happen.”

The poems reveal again and again a guarded strength that will not be overwhelmed by loss. In “Three Jewls: A Commentary,” Zimet concludes:

I am still with the contents of this emptiness,
no relic, no recognizable thing.
There was nothing there after all,
but my gift.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but when you stick with it, it sticks with you, and in its own spare, powerful way offers unexpected comfort.

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The Lost Grip by Eva Zimet, Rootstock Publishing, December 15, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Scudder H. Parker lives in Vermont and is a poet and author of Safe as Lightning.