This book brings together thirty years of writing: two previously released chapbooks A Lover's Quarrel with America and Dostoevsky & Other Nature Poems along with new work from the last decade. All of it bears Frumkin's signature stoic humor. These poems have emanated from nature are meant to be a tribute to nature: the nature of the four elements human nature, art and artists as facts of nature, and the nature of language itself. Described as an "unlineal descendant of Doestoevsky," Frumkin uses philosophical equations and remarkable language to describe hopeful endurance within the modern condition, life strategies "where green disengages/from truth/and emerges armed with wily music."
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The Old Man Who Swam Away and Left Only His Feet brings together thirty years of Gene Frumkin's poetry-fine new work along with poems previously published in the chapbooks A Lover's Quarrel with America and Dostoevsky & Other Nature Poems, some seventy poems in all. Frumkin's poems are characterized by their long-lined, free-flowing and spatial arrangements. Typographic congestion can be a notable problem with work of this sort; for readers to appreciate the music of poems constructed with Frumkin's rambling commitment to field composition requires both a generous page and visually clean text type adequately framed by white space. La Alameda Press meets these challenges with a slightly oversized, 8 x 8 inch book employing the handsome Joanna typeface designed in 1931 by Eric Gill. That Gene Frumkin was convincingly taught by the late Thomas McGrath is evident in both the physical sweep and in the meditative voice and geographic details of his poems. Intimate human yearning, direct observations resonant with a sense of loss, memory squeezed through the clay and sand of time, Jewishness, literary and artistic community, and the vistas and landscapes of the American Southwest are constants throughout the book. The poems in The Old Man Who Swam Away and Left Only His Feet are genuinely accessible, intelligent, personable and meaningful without being intellectually cryptic and academically hyped. There's a palpable and moving presence of solitude, as in these lines from "Still Life With Pear and Old Man:" Your wife still loves you in her LA letters/Those faded mirrors: you look like the Sandia Mountains 10 minutes after/they have outgrown the big orange balloon/Such times are the settling wings of an eagle/such silence is friendly/and absence the applause of the universe Gene Frumkin is a satisfying, unpretentious poet and "The Old Man Who Swam Away" offers readers the range, variety and music of his work. -- From Independent Publisher
From the Publisher
Published by La Alameda Press
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