Bøger af Jan Schreiber

The poems in Jan Schreiber's remarkable new collection enter through the ear as well as the eye, but they quickly capture the mind and the heart. Subtle and multi-layered, sensuous, witty, and often deeply moving, they enlist the reader as an ally, one able to share the poet's sense of wonder, his probing curiosity, and his wry astonishment at the quirky eccentricities of humankind. Jan Schreiber's new book of poems is full of people: Scoop (too drunk to fight), Buddy's daughter (due in May), the Reverend Charles Colby, the storekeeper's wife, the senior psychoanalyst (who dances like a dervish), the aging lover, the man of the world (eying a balcony covered with vines), the artist Moses Soyer, the stone mason, the wasp-girl, Vermeer's singer (the light is in her eyes), the grifter at Heaven's Gate, the poet's wife (a painter), Adam, Zeno, Death, Calypso, a bunch of teenagers on the back of a yellow pickup truck. His Human Comedy is much like Balzac's for its wealth of characters, humor, and bitter wisdom, though since Schreiber is a poet the narratives are washed and submerged, like islands, by image and melody-the glinting surface of the verse-that still reflects them clearly when the tide is high. -Emily Grosholz As King Duncan learned the hard way (and more than once!), "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face," but then he'd never read Jan Schreiber. Schreiber possesses an uncanny gift for seeing past "the common guise many have learned to wear." Whether it's the brave face put on by a dying friend, the shucking of a small-time con man at the Pearly Gates, or the thoughts of a figure in a stolen Vermeer, Schreiber goes beyond the subterfuge of surfaces into the very life of things. He is as incisive in lapidary "short takes" (à la J. V. Cunningham) as he is in sinewy sonnets and mazy pastorals of rural Maine, exposing by turns our peccadilloes and our more serious infractions: "And to what hell in time are they consigned - / the instants when in rage or carelessness / someone destroyed a lovely, hard-won thing?" Fortunately for us, the familiar foibles catalogued in Jan Schreiber's glorious collection are amply atoned for, again and again, through his poet's grace. -David Yezzi

Bay Leaves, Jan Schreiber's slim yet impressive new volume of poems, shows us a world alive with animal energy and enlivening beauty, defying Wallace Stevens - "The hawk will never think / that hawk and branch are one" - and imagining Heisenberg's ode to his own uncer¬tainty - "Surely the race is over, but who won?" Schreiber's acute observations of the natural world stand in effort¬lessly for our own deepest spiritual lives, just as his dramatic monologues fluently conduct wisdom gained from human suffer¬ing. These superbly crafted poems pulse with intellectual vitality, as we picture "phantoms of birds balance on branches in / the labyrinthine circuits of the brain." Bay Leaves is a pure delight. - Ernest Hilbert, author of Last One OutJan Schreiber's Bay Leaves is uncommon, and uncommonly fine, in several ways. The voice is admirably measured in a time of verbal pyrotechnics, yet the writing is amply studded with mem¬ora¬ble strokes of diction and imagery. The surfaces in these poems are unusually trans¬parent, the better to reveal considerable, sometimes mysterious depths. Schreiber's view of life is fundamentally tragic, but stoically so, and leaves ample room for humor including of the laugh-out-loud variety beauty, and love. And all of these virtues are delivered in formal verse of impec¬cable craft. Bay Leaves is both distinct and of distinction: a book whose modest compass affords more than enough room to move, intrigue, and tickle by turns. - Daniel Brown, author of What More?