Description
Praise
“Burt Kimmelman is a poet who trusts what is: the continuous autonomy of two people in a close marriage, the unalterable passage of time, the lies the mirror tells us, the comfort of “simply living / among the objects of the day.” Yet, like the inimitable domestic scenes painted by Pierre Bonnard, Kimmelman’s quiet poems contain the luminescence of perception, its lure, its beauty, its Zen of breath, tracing beauty in the pulse of the extant.” —Star Black
Praise for Burt Kimmelman’s Earlier Work
“. . . a rare evocation . . . the wonder of this world in itself.” —Robert Creeley
“As quiet an experience as anyone could wish for.” —Cid Corman
“. . . a strict & powerful accounting, leaving me . . . filled with
admiration & hooked on every word.” —Jerome Rothenberg
“. . . form calls deeply to form, as though the works . . . lifted one
to the very brim of language.” —Michael Heller
“Kimmelman . . . finds what is luminously transcendent in the
routines of everyday life.” —Harvey Shapiro
“[The] poems evince a quality infrequently encountered in con-
temporary American poetry: modesty, an attentive and forthright
modesty . . . worth our own best attention.” —John Taggart
“[In Kimmemelman’s poems] the arts restate the questions we have
been asking and the ways they clean and stretch our questions
reward us more than answers would.” —William Bronk
“His confidence lies with the poem itself, that he has found it (or
it has found him). . . .” —Norman Finkelstein, The Offending Adam
“Few contemporary poets so gracefully demonstrate classic
notions of what the practice of poetry must be.” —Madeline Tiger, Jacket
Excerpt
Thanksgiving Morning
Yellow flowers leaning from
a glass vase of water on
a wooden table where a
petal has fallen – autumn
sun, a wayward guest, shines through.
Author
Burt Kimmelman has published six previous collections of poetry – As If Free (talisman House, Publishers, 2009), There Are Words (Dos Madres Press, 2007), Somehow (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005), The Pond at Cape May Point (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, First Life (Jensen/Daniels Publishing, 2000), and Musaics (sputyen Duyvil Press, 1992). A poem from his newest book was featured on nPr’s The writer’s Almanac. For over a decade he was senior Editor of the now defunct Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at new Jersey institute of technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and American Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson university Press, 1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (Peter lang Publishing, 1996; paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (Facts on File, 2005) and co-edited the Facts on File Companion to American Poetry (Facts on File, 2007). He has published scores of essays on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry. A recent interview with tom Fink appeared online in Jacket 40.
Visit BurtKimmelman.com for further details and links.
