A Map of the Winds

“Write me a poem/called a map of the winds,” asks Mark Statman’s son. Knowing he can’t, Statman writes one instead about father and son, about belief and Brooklyn. In this new poetry collection, Statman investigates what it means to look at the world, to live in the world, and to wonder about it in ways that are at once speculative and specific. Whether traveling (England, South America, Italy, across the United States) or being at home, this practice of looking closely and imagining, translates into poems that are spare and descriptive (“concentrated and bare as any poetry,” writes David Shapiro). At once direct and elusive, these poems show how the closer Statman gets to understanding what he sees, what results is the realization that he has not seen enough, perhaps not at all, yielding another investigation, another series of imperative questions.

Mark Statman is a poet who has mastered the difficult craft of transparency -- you look through his poems into the world, a world sometimes luminous, sometimes dark, but always accompanied with a sense of astonishment and grace. Statman's voice is a kind of spare lyricism that reminds me of the ancient Greek poets of the Anthology or the concise voicings of Antonio Machado. There are no flourishes or frills to this kind of writing, no gilding or ornamentation: