The poems in celebrated poet Elton Glaser’s sixth collection journey through the seasons, from spring to spring, a pilgrimage down to the South, over the Midwest of snow and roses, and across the Romance countries of Europe. If the poet often finds himself “[h]alfway between grief and longing,” that may be his natural condition, rooted in this world against the pull of the next, his faith in the “purple evidence of plums, the testimony of wild persimmon” weathering the stormy preachers and the droughts of middle age.
Within that tension, the range of tones is unlimited, sometimes in the same poem, from the serious to the sublime, from anguish to awe. Holding everything together is Glaser’s unmistakable voice, a warm idiom made pungent by wintry wit: “my tongue of odd American, my mongrel sublime.” Whether the poems speak of ripe pears or minor prophets, they invite the reader to a feast of language that lets us taste how it feels to live on this earth, in the shadow of the afterlife.
Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Akron. He is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press, where he was the director for a number of years. Some of his previous poetry collections include Pelican Tracks, Winter Amnesties, and Color Photographs of the Ruins. He has received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. In 1996 he was presented the Ohioana Poetry Award in recognition of his many contributions to poetry as a teacher, publisher, and poet. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry.
“Here and Hereafter is a sly guidebook to the intricacies and mysteries of human existence. Glaser blends the charm and wit of a Southern storyteller with the ironic gaze of an Ohio suburbanite to create ‘a pickled idiom / For the slow torment of the middle class.’ A poet of place, Glaser’s unique and often hilarious perspective comes in handy in Spain and Italy, where a speaker wonders if the Virgin Mary ever had the postpartum blues. Glaser is a poet you want to travel with—his vivid, eloquent lines are full of surprise and adventure.”
—Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems and Kinky
“A Louisiana wise guy living in the heart of the heart of the country, Elton Glaser in these poems celebrates available joys. In addition to his domestic axis of Ohio and his native Louisiana, here are trips to Italy and Spain, and poems that survey the darker faces of American religiosity, poems in praise of gardens and food and other simple joys, poems about Bonnard and Roman household gods. As always, his language is exact and surprising. For wit, and for the precision of right words in the right order, few of his contemporaries can equal this poet.”
—Ed Ochester, author of Land of Cockaigne and Snow White Horses: Selected Poems, 1973–1988
