Bøger af Mark Perlberg

Direct, tactful, and compassionate, the poems in Waiting for the Alchemist, published posthumously, tell us things we need to knowabout art, history, nature, love, and life. Wholly without pretension, these poems make us feel that we have discovered the truth. The poet accomplishes this partly by his delicate touch with rhyme and assonance, partly by making himself seem almost an accidental instrument of the poem, and someone who just happens to be conveying it. The reader cannot help but respond with affection and gratitude. The title poem reminds us that the philosophers stone is more likely to turn up in our backyardor in our imaginationthan in a laboratory. The poems of the second section address history with restraint and tenderness, while those in section three explore contemporary lives. In the final section, Perlberg writes about his family, his friends, and himself. In the poem In My Next Life the poet writesperhaps smiling inwardlythat he will then be amiable, mostly, but large / and formidable, and adds, with a wink, Ill insist you be present / in my next lifeand the one after that.

A collection of verse by Mark Perlberg. The poems, some of them autobiographical in nature, cover such themes as family, meditations on time and memory, and heart surgery.

Winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award Gifted with a unique and elemental style that goes to the heart of things, often with Zenlike simplicity, Mark Perlberg published four books of poetry over the course of his long and accomplished life. At the time of his death in 2008 he was in the process of putting together Theater of Memory, a collection of his best poems, both published and unpublished, which he saw as the summation of his life's work. His wife, Anna Nessy Perlberg, completed the manuscript and contributed an afterword to the collection. Moving and unpretentious, the poems range from verses about the poet's childhood, including the early death of his father, to pieces in conversation with Chinese poet T'ao Ch'ien, to poignant poems about his grandson. A slowly deflating helium balloon becomes a meditation on aging and the urgency to teach his grandson "to remember in perilous / times to keep something of himself for himself."