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This captivating volume combines a tone of quiet eloquence with compelling forms to carry the tensions born from the fleeting connectedness apparent in all of life. Anthony Petrosky, in his third collection of poems, charts the longing and exasperation of desire and attachment. With intensely felt attention to specific gestures and occasions, he offers moving portraits of people and times kept close through a careful, often surprising questioning of memory and imagination.
Petrosky’s verse engages the spiritual and the joyful, the passionate and the peculiar, as well as the disturbing complexities of love, offering us small epiphanies from ordinary unpredictable moments.
Maybe you already know you must do something
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
then you’re in the river
voices build and break
and nothing changes yet everything changes
then the sun is remarkable finally
and burns us so in love with it
and warms the waters
and we feel again heat in each other
as Cypriot children dance a Hora
and mercy is in short supply in Kosovo
and between us there are only these words
and a radio on a window ledge outside the Jing Jang that plays Hayden
all night
as 747s land while the sun comes up in Madrid as hundreds of thousands
of faucets run and toilets flush and faces get shaved and love gets made
and the children sleep as the dogs pace in a slight wind that ripples the maples.
From “All of This” published in Crazy Love: Poems by Anthony Petrosky. Copyright © 2003 by Anthony Petrosky. All rights reserved.
Anthony Petrosky is also the author of Red and Yellow Boat and Jurgis Petroskas, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. He divides his time between the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of English and the director of teacher education; Lincolnville Center, Maine; and Gwangju, South Korea.
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