Böcker av Michael Salcman

Ekphrastic poems bump up against poems about baseball, about the sad fate of urban areas, about art, about ordinary mortality, and most personally about the horrific murders perpetrated during the Holocaust and other atrocities, as in "The Vanished World of Iryna Abramov," a villanelle set during the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "In Bucha, the flowers grow fat on the graves." This is a collection to be read and read again, and to cherish with each re-reading.

Here it is: a treasure chest of poems, fresh as wonder, enduring as humanity In Necessary Speech: New and Selected Poems.

In Shades & Graces, Salcman tells us early on that “Every intern knows it doesn’t matter how long an incision is, just how wide,” and in this accurate and marvelous detail provides a metaphor for the way a surgeon’s suturing provides a signature, “closed but open like a grave,” that “even God can’t erase.” In poem after poem, Salcman’s signature—the stitched lines of his verse—are characterized by verve, clarity, and formal finesse, and as such they attempt to heal the various and vexing wounds of experience.   —Michael Collier, former poet laureate of Maryland, director of the Bread Loaf Writers╩╝ Conference, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of “My Bishop and Other Poems.”