From Publishers Weekly:
In this promising first book, winner of the 1991 Walt Whitman Award, Glazner assesses the complexities of loss. In meditative poems where nature anchors what we know of reality, he suggests that life's meaning exists to link memory with perception. A solitude evoked by the landscapes of Texas and the American West works its way into some of the poems. In others, insight is instead set against a social landscape: "I let the ghostly / starlight-whitened dust of exploded rooms / shine onto me like any other / blameless thing." Glazner turns to nature or the spiritual realm to find terms of praise, asking, in "The Metaphysician's Weekend," "Are we the heirs / the old ones built for, tiny and alive, / our breath rising into a hull / of symbols?" Where the poet falters, his language fails to carry freshness or edge--as when, in an untitled work, "the silences at night/ pressed like faceless presences against the windows." But with Glazner, faltering is rare.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal:
To read this book is to enter into an astonishing music and flow of images. Things seen--"A blackened match/ washes up to the dock, clings there"--give the reader bearings in a poetry that might otherwise be overpowering. This poetry sounds good even when you do feel a little lost in it. Major themes--the natural history of the American Southwest and the influence of Hispanic culture there, as well as glimpses into Texas high school football games and factory night shifts--are subsumed by the powerful rhythms of the verse. This is a poet whose observation of men "sledgehammering the nineteenth-century adobe/ledges off the balcony next door" leads to a reflection on Navajo prayer, Spanish crucifixes, and the nature of thought itself. A heady ride, well worth taking.
- Kathleen Norris, Lemmon P.L., S.D.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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