Long Way Back to the End

Poetry. This is poetic prose at its finest. Paul B. Roth's sentences unfold, gradually reveal ever deeper meanings, and then crystallize into moments of communicable inner experience no less drawing on the vivid particulars of the natural world. LONG WAY BACK TO THE END especially focuses on solitude, on loss, and on "waiting" so intense and resonant that one thinks of the French term, attente. "Who passes by, who doesn't notice you, who never notices you or ever comes for you," he writes in the first of the haunting prose poems collected in this volume, "is a much larger part of your life than you theirs." These are pensive, sensitive, mellifluous evocations characterized by the play of sunlight (or moonlight) and darkness. Shadows flit by or envelop in settings where the narrator pits his yearning against his need to accept. The tension here is fully ours, for each of us must also ponder which orientation should win out at the end.

Paul B. Roth's work has been published widely in the U.S. and has been translated and anthologized in Japan, Romania, France, Algeria, Mexico, China and Israel. He has published four books in the current millennium entitled FIELDS BELOW ZERO (Cypress Books, 2002), CADENZAS BY NEEDLELIGHT (Cypress Books, 2009), Words the Interrupted Speak (March Street Press, 2011), and LONG WAY BACK TO THE END (Rain Mountain Press, 2014). He resides in Fayetteville, NY, editing and publishing contemporary international poetry from The Bitter Oleander Press.