The Charisma of Animals

The Charisma of Animals is Maertz's first volume of poetry. Completed during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, this collection of poems incorporates structural and sonic echoes of formalism in brief lyrics (sonnets and ballads) and longer narrative poems in which intensely personal experiences-love and loss, illness and recovery, encounters with nature and wildlife, history and works of art-are made concrete and accessible. Intensely emotional, precisely descriptive, and filled with enchantment conjured by his empathy for the natural world, Maertz's poetry belongs to the province of memories, dreams, and sacred places in his personal mythology: the fishing village of Gravir on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland's Outer Hebrides (home of Eriskay ponies, a vanishing breed of white horses), the Hawaiian Islands, Lake Minnetonka, Manhattan, Heidelberg, Munich, Bergen, Paris, and Griggstown, an historic village on the outskirts of Princeton, New Jersey, where he makes his home with Hooksy, a big orange tabby, in a former cidery.