Searching for Home

Searching
for Home, Pack’s splendid twenty-second collection of poems,
written largely during his last year of life, centers on the search for
meaning. At its heart are sequences of poems about three figures, each a seeker
after some physical or conceptual home where uncertainties are overcome.
·       Charles
Darwin circumnavigates the world and gleans the evidence for his theory of
evolution but seems to sanction a godless world of randomness and struggle. ·       Escaping
Nazis, Albert Einstein immigrates to America, where he fights for peace while
unsuccessfully trying to prove his unified field theory. ·       Pogroms
force the poet’s scholarly Uncle Phil from Russia to America, where he lives in
reduced circumstances and longs to relocate to Israel.






Searching for meaning informs other deeply felt poems, likewise rendered
in supple metrical language, as do themes of empathy, peace, humor, and the
beauty of nature—pushbacks against disappointment, mortality, and the human
propensity for cruelty and violence. It is a landscape dotted with remembered
moments of joy and wonder: otters slide down a muddy slope, kids put on a
hilarious version of The Odyssey, a
dog teases a little boy. . . .  Searching for Home is both a vision of
Pack’s own odyssey and his final testament to what matters.