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Stopping time on the page to discover the poetic moment where past and present are one, Vincent Katz (called a poet of vibrant cinematic hunger by Eileen Myles) opens himself to the fleeting beauty of both culture and nature in this stunning gathering of new work. With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil, setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animalsThe hope in fear / In thrill to run of the rabbit, the snapping turtle nestled // Next to brother rockas the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, Its not about buying / But rather about feeling the air. Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream? Katz writes, considering Daffodil. Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where were aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing. These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.
Stopping time on the page to discover the poetic moment where past and present are one, Vincent Katz (called a poet of vibrant cinematic hunger by Eileen Myles) opens himself to the fleeting beauty of both culture and nature in this stunning gathering of new work.
With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil, setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animalsThe hope in fear / In thrill to run of the rabbit, the snapping turtle nestled // Next to brother rockas the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, Its not about buying / But rather about feeling the air.
Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream? Katz writes, considering Daffodil. Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where were aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing.
These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.