Travelers on My Route

“Unrecorded,” the first poem in Carolyn Raphael’s rich new collection, begins: “We breathe in smoke when Pepys describes the fire / of London, wince when Plath bites Hughes’s cheek / at their intense encounter.” Thanks to her curiosity, sensitivity, and technical mastery, we gasp at the cruelty of Roman and Renaissance nobility, groan at the aches of aging, and mourn the loss of departed friends and family members. Wry observations mingle smoothly with tender family moments, as poems in free verse mingle with those in traditional forms—a number of excellent sonnets, a touching rondeau, and a pair of superb villanelles. The fullness of the living expertly chronicled on every page of Travelers on My Route constantly disproves the conclusion of “Unrecorded,” that “there is no room / to chronicle a life consumed with living.”

—Michael Palma

While the renowned arts with powerful literary journals, rapturous music, majestic frescoes can be our “compass” to human “triumph” or “heartache,” Carolyn Raphael astutely admits “a life consumed with living” cannot be fully “chronicle[d].” And yet, with enamored and exquisite eloquence, she gives us a resonant glow from her life experiences and that of other real and imaginary figures, whom she gracefully and sensitively enters, and then looks out. Raphael evinces that by observing the world, we participate in making it. Traveling from joyous new birth, to meditations on a “cricket serenade,” to a noblewoman’s complaints from inside a Renaissance water game, skillfully shaped by traditional and original craftsmanship, Raphael’s poetic glow is rich with her keen attention and responsiveness to natural and human splendors and struggles, all marked by “time’s fingerprints.”

—Gayl Teller

“There still is time for laughter,” declares Cosimo I de’ Medici at the end of the poem “Water Games,” even though he has just enumerated unbearable losses that have befallen him. This pronouncement might as well be the motto of Travelers on My Route, a book that celebrates life despite trauma and tragedy, ravages of aging and illness. Resignation is never the answer. Instead, Carolyn Raphael always finds reasons for joie de vivre, while acknowledging the cycle of blossoming and decay: “Some needles yellow, then turn to brown / and fall each fall. I think it’s dying, / but it’s only pruning the weak and old, / making way for the newly green” (“A Calendar of Trees”). This is a wise and invigorating collection and a thrilling testament to the human spirit.

—Anton Yakovlev