Beyond the Velvet Curtain

In the presence of certain kinds of excellence in poetry, there is the temptation to say that they speak for some enduring principles of the art. This book makes me want to say 'that play' pure high spirit in the skilled and sensitive arrangement of words and parts of words 'may be what helps a poet most when the poet is concerned with both engaging emotion and avoiding sentimentality. 'We make the worlds we live in as best we can, out of the materials we have been given. The worlds of Beyond the Velvet Curtain a re in some ways remote from mine, but like mine, they run on good will and a faith in the power of human love. I am grateful to have encountered these poems.--from the Foreword by Henry Taylor. In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Milosz's dictum that 'the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person. People with such diverse characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafka's father, Dorothea Lange, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement-park ride through world history and art. Kovacik's poetry places us in the strange drama of cataclysmic events and ordinary life.