Hank Lazer’s field recordings of mind in morning reviewed by Donald Revell

Hank Lazer’s field recordings of mind in morning is reviewed by Donald Revell in Restless Messengers: Poetry In Review.

An All-Encompassing Elegy

Review by Donald Revell

Can a man rise early enough to step into the day without a word? Henry David Thoreau thought of his entire life, and not just of his writing life, as “morning work,” as a purposeful though aimless striding beside the rhythmos of the day. When poetry is true, it is always a rhythm long before it settles into words. Such is the magic of the Psalms in their defiance of metrical number, and such is the magic of Thoreau’s Journals, the day book that is America’s single epic. In his most recent collection, a six-part sequence of awakenings, Hank Lazer proposes a striding psalmody, his own intricate and unguarded morning work. Crossing over landscape (say, a meadow) or delving through inscape (say, imperfect ancestral memory), the rhythm of these poems captivates one remarkable day after another. […]

Read the whole review here

Buy Hank Lazer’s field recordings of mind in morning here