All That Will Be New

In the poem that opens this, hisninth collection, one of our most celebrated men of letters contemplates the“primordial tensions” felt in the crashing waves of a Northeaster, the glory andterror of the storm as “the real comes crashing finally down on you.”Contemplating as we all must the unrelenting passing of time and the harshrealities of history, Paul Mariani embodies the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’sdictum that “the artist is the one who does not look away.”

In the face of pandemics, wars, andthe open wound of racism, the poet continues his search for those artists,activists, writers, and saints who can guide us through the wilderness and helpus preserve the hope that all things can be made new.

Whether he is contemplating painters from Caravaggio to VanGogh in deft ekphrastic poems, evoking the courageous witness of Harriet Tubmanand Malcolm X, or visiting with the poets, living and dead, who have been hismasters, Paul Mariani’s lyrical voice rings true. In the end, after the arduousjourney that has taken him so far, the poet joins a simple supper, where thereal shines forth in the breaking of bread