Laps
by Michael Blumenthal
Poems exploring cycles, repetition, and the passage of time
Laps is the winner of the 1984 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press. The book is a sequence of poems in 32 sections written in the voice of a swimmer engaged in a half-mile swim. Blumenthal sees swimming as an act of rhythm and purification, of immersion and transformation, of exile, initiation, and return. His poems have an extraordinary combination of brightness and depth. They record a complex pattern of rhythms, a motion somewhere between incantation and prayers, between sport and ritual, between wakefulness and sleep, between our terrestrial life and the aquatic species we evolve from.
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"LAPS is a winner…It is not by accident that Laps begins and ends with references to the world outside the pool. At the beginning, the world is ugly, a nuisance; at the end, it is beautiful, a fascination. The reader experiences the transformation. Enthusiastically recommended."
— Joseph Garrison, Library Journal
"Laps is a beautifully designed book and a successful meditative poem. It embodies wisdom but not, ultimately, at the expense of being."
— Peter Stitt, Poetry