In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Finkel carves a clearing out of the backyard brush and the intellectual brambles of existence.
Whether he writes a short lyric or a long experimental series, Finkel relies on concrete images—a breeze through grass, a cigarette in a piano player’s hand—to ground his central questions about the clash of order and chaos in our everyday lives.
He delights in naming weeds and towering trees, cars and streets. Yet, in each poem, there is a constant tension between the actual wind and the words we must use to convey the wind’s force.
Working fluently in formal lines and in free verse, he can write with equal authority of butchers or great painters, aged bookkeepers or schizophrenics, Greek gods or house cats. In this new collection, Finkel has given us the priceless keepsakes, the best gifts from the clearing his words have won.
Of Donald Finkel’s fourteen books, two have been nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, another was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his most recent received the Dictionary of Literary Biography’s 1994 Year book Award. A Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, he taught for thirty-one years at Washington University in St. Louis and served as a visiting professor at Bennington College and Princeton University. He is now retired and lives in St. Louis.
“Here again, happily, is the poet’s special magic: in the longer poems brief spurts of lyric, quotes and metaphoric notation link into a steady flow of characterization, philosophical meditation or narrative, or all three. Sow thistle, speedwell, clover blooming in man-made clearings . . . words of a schizophrenic friend . . . ‘the discourse of grass, that tremulous braille’—who knows the beauty and waste of life better than Donald Finkel?”
—Mona Van Duyn
