No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012 - Softcover

Blumenthal, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 098329447X ISBN 13: 9780983294474

Publisher: Etruscan Press, 2012

Synopsis

The finest collection of poetry I’ve read in a very long time.”
Ron Hansen

From my birth mother
I took my melancholy disposition
and from my father
the ability to get through life
with a bullet in one arm.
from "Genetics"

No Hurry is a book of poems for the aging in body but youthful in spirit, for those interested in continuing to ask most meaningful questions as they head downhill”: What does it mean to be alive? What shall we make of this journey from birth to death? How can we find meaning and joy amid our mortality and suffering?

About this title

About the Author

Michael Blumenthal’s is the author of seven previous books of poetry, most recently And published by BOA Editions in 2009. A graduate of Cornell Law School and formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has just been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from the German, French and Hungarian and former psychotherapist, he spent a month in South Africa in May of 2007 working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation, an experience he has chronicled in Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine. His book-length account, Because They Needed Me:” The Incredible Struggle of Rita Miljo To Save The Baboons of South Africa, will be published in Germany next year. Two of his other books, a collection of selected poems and a memoir, were also recently published in Germany and featured at The Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall of 2011. He is currently Visiting Professor of Law at The University of West Virginia College of Law.

Review

What a terrific book this is! . . . [Blumenthal] thinks out loud for all of us, affirms and denies with wit, charm, and best of all, with what feels like hard-won accuracy.”
Stephen Dunn

Michael Blumenthal’s poetry never sits heavy on the reader yet is substantial, civilized, and capable of articulating the human condition, including its pains and losses, without melodrama, high sentence, or self-pity. No Hurry is a gorgeous book: the world of flesh, mind, and heart spoken through air and silk.”
George Szirtes

Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?”
Lynn Freed

“What a terrific book this is! . . . [Blumenthal] thinks out loud for all of us, affirms and denies with wit, charm, and best of all, with what feels like hard-won accuracy.”
―Stephen Dunn

“Michael Blumenthal’s poetry never sits heavy on the reader yet is substantial, civilized, and capable of articulating the human condition, including its pains and losses, without melodrama, high sentence, or self-pity. No Hurry is a gorgeous book: the world of flesh, mind, and heart spoken through air and silk.”
―George Szirtes

“Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?”
―Lynn Freed

Edition details

• Publisher: Etruscan Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 098329447X
• ISBN 13: 9780983294474
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 125