Description:
Marc Kaminsky's A Cleft in the Rock is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded-in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body-these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to "live/with catastrophe in the world/of signs and wonders." His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human. -D. Nurkse
Sample:
In Eldorado Springs
He opened a rock and water flowed;
in the desert rivers ran.
-Psalm 105
Walking along a trail
at the edge of a precipice,
you turned as each new
wonder came into view
to show me your face
bursting into soundless
laughter, your eyes
communicated intensities
of delight and awe
that spoke to my whole
body like drum language
and placed me in the scale
of things never seen before.
With each step, I entered
the area of your surprise-
a vein of wilderness
through which shy rattlesnakes
slip in and out of the sun
and we become unobtrusive
so as not to disturb
the solitude of the mountain
lion and the green pastures
where elk come out
in the open to rut.
Brief description: Marc Kaminsky is a poet and retired psychotherapist. He is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Stones of Lifta (Dos Madres Press), The Road from Hiroshima (Simon & Schuster), and Daily Bread (University of Illinois Press). His poems, essays and fiction have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Manhattan Review, The American Scholar, Natural Bridge, The Oxford Book of Aging, and Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. He has published six books on aging, reminiscence and late-life development, and the culture of Yiddishkeit.
Review Quotes:
Marc Kaminsky's A Cleft in the Rock is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded-in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body-these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to "live/with catastrophe in the world/of signs and wonders." His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human.
-D. Nurkse
A book of voyages, named for a moment in the people's ur-voyage, written in the generations-long moment between departure and arrival, where even the rock on which a life is built turns out to be less than solid. Not so much a guide book as a record of a hard-won acceptance: "Isn't it time/ I took up residence/ on the site of loss, / in the house of my wavering, / my impurity and impermanence?" An invitation to "the stranger's table," where we dine together.
-Mark Weiss
The stakes are total in Marc Kaminsky's A Cleft in the Rock, a radically candid account of a life marked by guilt, pain, and redemption by a mature poet whose every observation opens onto "a moment in the life of the planet." Beginning with "Days of Kivi," a long elegy that I can only compare to Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish for the vividness of its reenactment of memory, the reader is pulled into the rushing torrent of family drama, in this case the growing madness and early death of a younger brother. Grounded in Jewish spiritual practice and a quest for a moral life, Kaminsky's poems have the power of "the lost ocean/ rushing through rock" and become in themselves vehicles for healing. They constitute collectively an extended prayer that "I might live/with catastrophe in the world/ of signs and wonders."
-Lee Sharkey