Albert Goldbarth

For years people have suggested I might like Goldbarth, and this volume, published by New Rivers a year after my birth, bears out their prediction. Goldbarth's writing is luminously concrete, grounded yet in the clouds. He is more a poet of the mot juste than one of prosody, but he does so with a quietude beyond prose. He writes most trenchantly of the body and the spirit. The first half of the book treats his family--parents, grandparents--with wonder and sympathy:

Go read it to Grandpa. Every breath is
small and distinct now, and on its way up
meets a leaf on its way down. Now
you know what dying is: it
adds the flutter
to gravity's straight-ruled pull.

--"Library Card in an Old Name"

In the second half, the Books of Belief, he exposes the various hidden things of this world: the forbidden, the disgusting, the indescribable.

Today, a nuclear reactor poured
its heart out somewhere in Pennsylvania, our wedding
plans were wrapped like truncated mummies in
the phone, out in Utah somebody slipped Saint Bullet
into its chamber in The Church of The Gun

--"Carrell / Klee / & Cosmos's Groom"

Highly recommended.… (more)