And
by Michael Blumenthal
Poems celebrating connection, continuation, and the power of conjunction
Through Michael Blumenthal's eyes we gain a renewed, childlike wonder at everything from plants, trees, and relationships to the most fundamental word in our vocabulary: AND. Blumenthal uses the conjunction to unify this collection and create a chanting, sonorous rhythm to his work. The result is a book of poems-as-hymns-and-praises. Michael Blumenthal holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. His other books include the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), and the poetry collection Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1999), for which he was awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Blumenthal's new collection of poems, titled "And," is the closest that the stoicism of Ecclesiastes will come to getting a 21st-century makeover. In it, there's a time to laugh and cry, scatter stones and gather them up, and all the rest. There's no point, though, in toil and hope beyond that. After reading these poems, which are designed with a cosmic sweep, you get the feeling that Blumenthal's plan is, as in Dylan Thomas's poem, eventually just to go gentle into that good night: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" be damned.—THE JEWISH DAILY FORWARD. Michael Blumenthal's stunning new book, And, is an Eliotic celebration of life in the world as continuum and progress. He achieves this through a simple and seductive meditation upon the conjunction, "and," and the way it enriches the complexity of language as it shapes lived experience.—The Montserrat Review
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"I have long admired Michael Blumenthal's poetry for its lavish forthrightness, the intractable wit, the sumptuous language, and the brave moral center. The flickering landscapes of his poems have, over the years, become a part of my own mental landscape. The poems in And are truth-giving poems, poems of radical innocence acquired the hard way, by passing through the crucible of experience. This important book deserves a wide audience."
— Jay Parini
"Brazen, humble, sly, disarming, stalwart, sweet: conjunction's fine continuo. These large-hearted poems take an all-embracing and for both motto and creed. 'More life!' they sing, even as they survey the major and minor wreckage life has dealt us. More life is what they generate too, unspooling lines as beautifully cadenced and sustained as any I know. This And is a gift."
— Linda Gregerson
"Michael Blumenthal, the later-day psalmist, encompasses in these brilliant poems both chatter and stillness, pantheism and skepticism, rapture and resignation to the ordinary. He is a wisdom poet, in the fullness of vision and opulent language; and this madly pleasurable collection heals the rift between the ardent and the comic."
— Phillip Lopate
"Michael Blumenthal's beautiful new book, And, is a full-throated, Whitmanian rhapsody for 'the ands and etceteras of the world,' its accidents, its gravities, its moments of grace. As the title implies, these poems refuse to leave anything out; they embrace 'the amazing riff-raff' of contemporary life: they sing of possibility itself in private and public life, in high art and pop culture, in the 'rough justice' of the natural world, and in humankind's capacity for love, compassion, deceit and depredation. Ambitious, big-hearted, funny and poignant, And is a book to celebrate and treasure."
— Alan Shapiro