And
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Through Michael Blumenthal’s eyes we gain a renewed, childlike wonder at everything from plants, trees, and relationships to the most fundamental word in our vocabulary: AND. Blumenthal uses the conjunction to unify this collection and create a chanting, sonorous rhythm to his work. The result is a book of poems-as-hymns-and-praises.
Michael Blumenthal holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. His other books include the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), and the poetry collection Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1999), for which he was awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award.
Blumenthal’s new collection of poems, titled “And,” is the closest that the stoicism of Ecclesiastes will come to getting a 21st-century makeover. In it, there’s a time to laugh and cry, scatter stones and gather them up, and all the rest. There’s no point, though, in toil and hope beyond that. After reading these poems, which are designed with a cosmic sweep, you get the feeling that Blumenthal’s plan is, as in Dylan Thomas’s poem, eventually just to go gentle into that good night: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” be damned.
--THE JEWISH DAILY FORWARD
Michael Blumenthal’s stunning new book, And, is an Eliotic celebration of life in the world as continuum and progress. He achieves this through a simple and seductive meditation upon the conjunction, “and,” and the way it enriches the complexity of language as it shapes lived experience.
--The Montserrat Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Few new books of American poems have more unity "or more happiness "than the latest from Blumenthal: the law professor, memoirist, novelist (Dusty Angel) and psychotherapist has set himself the daunting task of depicting joy in all its varieties. Almost all the poems use long unrhymed lines and long sentences; all the titles begin with And. Many titles read like updates on biblical verse ( And Whose Is the Triumph of Stinky Similitude? And Where Is the Rapture of the Seas? ), as if Blumenthal were writing his own book of psalms. His extended praise includes the spiritual ( he knows// that the air is rife with the anarchy of the possible,/ that the hills are moving, ever so secretly, during/ the night ) but also the erotic and the familial: his poems about love almost dare us to call them sentimental. Blumenthal has long made the positive emotions, those that risk sentimentality, his special subject: sometimes the results of that long study turn sublime. Elsewhere, though, Blumenthal fails to find words as exuberant or as satisfying as he wants to remind us that life can be: some readers will thrill, but others will likely balk, at the lustful little angel that inhabits his body, the deliquescence of the air whispering its soothing song.
