Overview
Marc Kaminsky's A Cleft in the Rock is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded-in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body-these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to "live/with catastrophe in the world/of signs and wonders." His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human. -D. NurkseSample: In Eldorado SpringsHe opened a rock and water flowed;in the desert rivers ran. -Psalm 105Walking along a trailat the edge of a precipice, you turned as each newwonder came into viewto show me your facebursting into soundlesslaughter, your eyescommunicated intensitiesof delight and awethat spoke to my wholebody like drum languageand placed me in the scaleof things never seen before.With each step, I enteredthe area of your surprise-a vein of wildernessthrough which shy rattlesnakesslip in and out of the sunand we become unobtrusiveso as not to disturbthe solitude of the mountainlion and the green pastureswhere elk come outin the open to rut.
- | Author: Marc Kaminsky
- | Publisher: DOS Madres Press
- | Publication Date: Apr 02, 2018
- | Number of Pages: 130 pages
- | Binding: Paperback or Softback
- | ISBN-10: 1948017032
- | ISBN-13: 9781948017039
