Lights & Mysteries

by Thomas Centolella

Overview

This second collection of poems from multi-award winning poet Centolella mixes Zen and Hasidic philosophy with classical skepticism, resulting in imaginative and compassionate impressions of daily details of life in urban America. A finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556591068
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/01/1995
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.40(d)

Editorial Reviews

Centolella establishes himself as major poetic voice in this, his second collection, taking on big questions of love, life, death and mystery with authoritative clarity of language and intensity of purpose. His first, Terra Firma, offered a cleverly mixed San Francisco post-Beat, neo-Zen hip view of the dark side of human nature from a kind of lapsed Catholic perspective of frailty and sin. The 43 poems in this volume continue the stylistic mixed bag, yet constitute a more coherent collection as they trace a three-part journey from new love to lost love and bitter self-examination to renewed compassion. Section I, pursuing the elusive glow of romance, contains some excessive writing: on a houseboat, ``We were any two creatures floating./ Wetness everywhere, the whole world liquescent, delicious.'' Poems of the next section, in which the poet wanders the city streets, are tough-minded and tightly wound: ``Pennants strung like motley teeth/ along the mission's little white stucco wall.'' The third section sounds basic Centolella themes: ``Love more, require less, love without regard/ for form. You have to live further in.'' (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Winner of the Lannan Literary Fellowship and an American Book Award for his first collection, Terra Firma (Copper Canyon., 1990), Centolella opens his new book with an intense round of personal love poems. Passionate and moving, they are just one aspect of this poet's "spiritual practice," which is "not to walk like a saint/ among the derelict, but to zero in on their muzzy eyes/ and give back their 'Hey man.' " Centolella's direct approach is rich with the day-to-day, documenting commercial and spiritual transactions with intelligence, music, and gentle humor. The poems drift like life rafts through the seedy mystery of West Coast city life, grounded in despair: "a cotton candy vendor so bent by the gods/ he was like a bird, his short spine parallel to the ground." But they are buoyant with epiphanies: "Intoxicating weather, like a drug from the East./ The moon full and Levantine, early lights on the hills,/ the locals floating to dinner on the magic carpet of the sidewalk." Careful and caring; highly recommended.-Ellen Kaufman, Gallery Lib., Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.

Library Journal