Life Lessons: Poems by Richard Aronowitz

Richard Aronowitz's Life Lessons is a book about coming into knowledge. Not so much from reading, but from living close to the natural world, to family and to history. Tied to a conviction that "We are what we have always been", these thoughtful, well-crafted poems evoke an English pastoral tradition almost as a birthright, except that today the poet escapes, not the tensions of the Elizabethan Court, but the gargantuan features of an industrial economy.

Richard Aronowitz’s Life Lessons is a book about coming into knowledge. Not so much from reading, but from living close to the natural world, to family and to history. Tied to a conviction that “We are what we have always been”, these thoughtful, well-crafted poems evoke an English pastoral tradition almost as a birthright, except that today the poet escapes, not the tensions of the Elizabethan Court, but the gargantuan features of an industrial economy. See the poem “Oil Boom.” The “Love Songs” celebrate human attachment. The book is dedicated to his son. Moving poems are addressed to his father and to the memory of relatives lost in the Nazi concentration camps, but the best are written to the beloved, Charlotte.  “You know,” he says in “South of the Equator”, “those currents that seem gentle/ on the surface, but hold you under/ their spell and there’s nothing you can do.” Such currents thread their sustaining force throughout these poems.

Roger Mitchell, author of LEMON PEELED THE MOMENT BEFORE: New and Selected Poems