Customer Reviews

A Letter to Serafin (Akron Series in Poetry)

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John Minczeski's A Letter to Serafin is an absolute original.

While he does share some common ground with other recent books that tell of immigrants' descendants trying to reclaim their grandparents' past, Minczeski's book is finally more ambitious. He uses the search for the Polish past of his Grandfather (the Serafin of the book's title) as a stepping stone to a wider search for our culture's artistic, mythical, religious, historic past - the Truths we all share.

What struck me most about this book was the way Minczeski handles this wider search. His feelings and thoughts are complex, but he doesn't make a show of this complexity. In this way, he reminds me of the later W. B. Yeats, a poet who spent a long time watching and wondering.

Minczeski's a smart and feeling person who has given a lot of himself to questions of time and art, belief and the past. His manuscript is not a young writer's manuscript, and I mean that in the best way. In every poem, you feel that Minczeski has spent a long time wondering about questions like: "Why does something my grandfather touched touch me as it does?" and "Why does a great painting effect us as it does?" and "What is it that you and I and a farmer working the dirt in Poland or Darfur or Iraq share?"

The answers that Minczeski suggests in his poems show that he hasn't been wasting his time.

His style is also thoughtful. It shows his careful consideration of his audience. Minczeski writes in a style that offers a subtle fusion of forthright plainspeak and a blend of near rhymes and soft cadences. You see this style clearly in the first four stanzas of his poem "Annunication":

What is she reading at her stand-up desk--
The Psalms maybe, the Song of Songs--

The morning an angel, feathers trembling
Like aspen leaves, appears?

The fragrance of his lily so overwhelms her,
She can barely hear.

Golden rays penetrate
With none of the usual trickery--

That last stanza could easily be a gloss of the style Minczeski uses throughout this book of poems.

Finally, I think the book is pretty terrific. I've read about 40 books of poetry since the beginning of this year, and this is easily the best. It is really a fine book that addresses the most essential questions in a language that is always engaging.


John Guzlowski
Author of Lightning and Ashes

"A Letter to Serafin" is a beautiful book to hold, but more importantly, the book is so beautiful in words, images and spirit that I felt moved to write something here. Poet John Minczeski takes a journey into his deep past, and closer past. He tells of his Polish ancestors hardscrabble existence (Serafin was his great-grandfather). It's a story in poems-- of what was to be, and will be forever etched in the stones of history. This book is written in 5 parts, the past overlapping the present, but softly, like water, and art merges with the soil, and back to history, and what is left to come. I highly recommend this book.