Exile Home

Praise for Exile Homeand Mark Statman

Mark Statman’s new book Exile Home is a love poem, a snapshot, to the poet’s adopted country so fresh in the poem “Mi México”. The air, the light, the poignancy of little girl with wooden bowl, & mystery of life next to another, a beloved partner, buzz with sharp grace. A contrast across the border, with family loss, but no walls, here. Power of “all the unseen… writ in glass in water clouds” join the fiesta. No ideas but in things. I want to go there too. This is a sweet and pungent sensory exile, almost a dream.

—Anne Waldman

Exile Home is an elegiac journey of discovery: “the room/ that lights/ the house” is the possibility of coming to be who you are in whatever place we find ourselves. These are poems of transition as a form of mediation and meditation. Mark Statman’s short lines mark the flux of sentiment as openness to what’s next. “can you believe/ we live like this?” Only time tells.

—Charles Bernstein

Mark Statman’s fiercely elegiac book begins with the long poem, “Green Side Up,” dedicated to his father. Written in lower case with no punctuation, it provides quick flashes of family memory and the present reality of grief. The reader is utterly absorbed and lifted: “on the phone/ you say it’s/ another DIP/ day in paradise/ waking early enough/ there were no/ sounds of morning/ only birdsong breeze/ the meaning of paradise/ that first moment/ alone and taking in/ coffee and sunlight.” This is realism in the most beautiful sense. We are taken to the living moment as it passes. Italo Calvino wrote of “the moral values invested in the most tenuous traces.”It’s in “the intensity of minor acts” (John Ashbery) that we are folded into the cloak of truth: “we did this/ we did this/ it happened/ before we thought it.” It was “a voice made for radio”: “Al Statman here/ good morning.”

—Paul Hoover

At his best, Mark Statman whimsically seduces us to plug what large emptiness we carry into the day. Such a playfulness of spirit and sound, not yet outlawed in these parts, lifts us toward some unforeseen feeling or study of human life that would have eluded us, were it not for his sparse and controlled lines. Here is an eclectic imagination that redeems the conventional exploits of language and all the dead zones around us. Exile Home consecrates Statman’s forever voice.

—Major Jackson

Mark Statman's books include EXILE HOME (Lavender Ink, 2019), TOURIST AT A MIRACLE (Hanging Loose, 2010), Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), the first English language translation of the significant poet of Spain's Generation of 1927, a translation, with Pablo Medina, of Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York (Grove 2008), as well as Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry (Teachers & Writers, 2000) and, co-edited with Christian McEwen, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (Teachers & Writers, 2000). About Statman's poetry, David Shapiro writes, "It is hard to compare it to anything else," William Corbett that his poetry is "America's grand plain style descended from William Carlos Williams and James Schuyler," and Joseph Lease, "Statman gives language as commitment, commitment as imagination, imagination as soul-making." Anselm Berrigan notes his "spare, concise, searching poems" in which "the present is inexhaustibly on the move." Joseph Stroud writes "Statman's voice is a kind...that reminds me of the ancient Greek poets of the anthology or the concise voicings of Antonio Machado." Aliki Barnstone calls him "a consummate poet-translator."