No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012
by Michael Blumenthal
Poems embracing slowness and mindful living
'The finest collection of poetry I've read in a very long time.'—Ron Hansen. From my birth mother I took my melancholy disposition and from my father the ability to get through life with a bullet in one arm.—from "Genetics". No Hurry is a book of poems for the aging in body but youthful in spirit, for those interested in continuing to ask most meaningful questions as they head "downhill": What does it mean to be alive? What shall we make of this journey from birth to death? How can we find meaning and joy amid our mortality and suffering?
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"What a terrific book this is! Blumenthal at his best, trying hard to love the life he's been given (and often succeeding), but always aware of what might go wrong. There is a constant pull in these probing and self-examining poems between those polarities. He thinks out loud for all of us, affirms and denies with wit, charm, and best of all, with what feels like hard-won accuracy."
— Stephen Dunn
"Clarity, grace, a kind of insouciant irony combined with warmth of feeling, Michael Blumenthal's poetry is light in the best sense: it never sits heavy on the reader yet is substantial, civilized and capable of articulating the human condition, including its pains and losses, without melodrama, high sentence or self-pity. The sensibility is related to Richard Wilbur's in terms of poetic intelligence, but is entirely its own. No Hurry is a gorgeous book: the world of flesh, mind and heart spoken through air and silk."
— George Szirtes
"Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?"
— Lynn Freed
"Even beyond their poise and elegance, there's a wonderful affability to Michael Blumenthal's poems. All have such an inviting sense of welcome, humor, romance, and intimacy that one may not immediately notice how elegiac, heartbreaking, and full of wisdom they are. This is the finest collection of poetry I've read in a very long time."
— Ron Hansen