Description
- Pages: 81
- Language: English
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-65-7
Praise
In Eric Hoffman’s new poems, quarried in part from Emerson’s Journal, the American eyeball is no longer “transparent” but constantly active and exploratory, the seer “insisting / Upon his right to see & judge.” Emerson’s reflections here acquire subtly new and distinctive rhythms that register the appetencies of vision even as they seek to measure “the weight of history.” The American eye, “Like a chemist assembling substances,” is searching, urgent, attracted to the accuracies of science, yet as the last sequence of poems also warns (Louis Agassiz is the exemplary figure here), that piercing gaze may also viciously affirm a world of social and racial hierarchies—in face of which our only hope, as Hoffman’s Emerson memorably avers, is to “search for what is similar / In ourselves.” —Peter Nicholls
Excerpt
My eye is American.
Like a chemist assembling substances
I bring myself to sea
In search of affinities –
The bubble –
By its birthright – expands –
& my American eye
Is like a child’s again
Author
Eric Hoffman is the author of five previous books of poetry. He lives and works in Connecticut. His web site can be found at: http://erichoffmanpoet.blogspot.com.
Other Books by Eric Hoffman
Everything Is Actual (2011)
Life At Braintree (2008)
Of Love and Water (2008)
Threnody (2006)
Things Like This Happen All the Time (2000)
