A book of intense emotional power, Elegies & Vacations marks
Hank Lazer's taking the resources of innovative poetry in new
directions that are at once elegiac, skeptical, and spiritual.
Eleven poems, no two alike, Elegies & Vacations is an ambitious
attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, "to recreate the heart of
poetry itself." Linking elegies to extended journal-like
meditations, Elegies & Vacations asks "what the day may mean."
At the heart of the book is a long poem, "Deathwatch for My
Father," which tracks the poet's father's final months, testing out
the capacities of innovative poetry in the face of the death of a
loved one. The book explores relationships with the dead - from the
poet's father, to John Cage, to Kenneth Burke, to George Oppen -
while also, through family vacations, projecting forward to ask "to
what are we ancestral." The opposed or apposed guiding lights of
the book - John Ashbery and George Oppen - like the juxtaposed
elegies and vacations, offer divergent modes of verbal and ethical
grace. Informed by a Buddhist sensibility, as well as by the
relativistic thinking of reform (and mystical) Judaism, Lazer's
poems move through varying terrains of form, textuality, and
geography, from Suzhou (China) to the Abacos (the Bahamas), from
Diamond Head (Oahu) to Orono (Maine), from an extended portrait to
a journal, from children's stories to a two-columned composition on
the nature of literary history.
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