In the opening poem of Matthew Porto’s dazzling debut collection, we hear the voice of the recurring angel figure for the first time, commanding us to “Get used to the light.” That light-blinding, mysterious, unsettling, but occasionally illuminating-shows up again and again in Porto’s taut, elegant poems. As he writes in another poem: “Some light, it’s true, makes it to us, but always / refractory, errant, struggling to deign downward.”
The occasions for these poems range from encounters with ancient biblical and mythological tropes to fresh translations of elegiac Anglo-Saxon verse to sojourns from Texas to Taiwan and Vermont to Venice.
Holding everything together-the themes of love and responsibility, memory and forgetfulness, loss and hope-is the grammar of the moon, ever-changing, yet ever-present. Here is a fully mature poetic voice, one which former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky rightly hails as “ingeniously alert, compelling, and unpredictable.”
Author: Matthew Porto
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Slant Books
Published: 01/30/2024
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.38d
ISBN: 9781639821570
Language: English
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.