From Publishers Weekly
Poet Goldbarth's essays are singular hybrids, seamlessly melding autobiography, history, fantasy, myth. "Delft" features an imagined encounter between painter Jan Vermeer and microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, set against a meditation on fleas which hops from the biblical plague to circus history. In "The History of the Universe Is Important to This Story," worldviews collide as astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler meet Rabbi Yehudah Loew of Prague, the presumed occultist of Golem legends, who creates a clay man to protect Jews from persecution. The sky-scanners' personal lives fold into Goldbarth's poignant recollections of his mother dying of cancer and his teenage affair with his best friend's half-sister. In "Worlds," the struggles of Goldbarth's grandparents, Polish Jewish immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side, run parallel to the antics of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strips, astronomer Percival Lowell's misidentification of "canals" on Mars, and Hopi cosmology. Death, eros, hope for the future and rueful wisdom are inseparably entwined in these wondrous essays full of intriguing lore and surprising connections.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (LJ 3/1/91), Goldbarth departs from poetry but not from his poetic genius in four essays that employ all the elements of poetry, thus the result: pure imaginative pleasure. Listen to the following: "Now light is...exemplified, it's seven points on seven stacked apples, it's ringed in a puddle-top's ripples, it's flat, it's latticed by shadows, it's binding." This is just one example of the linguistic excellence strewn throughout the book. The author integrates himself into a range of topics, from Vermeer, Leeuwenhoek, and Amy Lowell to Kepler and the rabbi of Prague. His essays break out of the traditional mold and go where none has gone before. History and the world are put into a paradox where time is treated philosophically, and we learn that "the future has been here a long, long, time." Goldbarth here writes with artistry and clarity, showing us why his work will also be with us for a long, long time.
Tim Gavin, Episcopal Academy, Merion, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Tim Gavin, Episcopal Academy, Merion, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
