No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012

by Michael Blumenthal

Overview

“The finest collection of poetry I’ve read in a very long time.”
—Ron Hansen

From my birth mother
I took my melancholy disposition
and from my father
the ability to get through life
with a bullet in one arm.
—from "Genetics"

No Hurry is a book of poems for the aging in body but youthful in spirit, for those interested in continuing to ask most meaningful questions as they head “downhill”: What does it mean to be alive? What shall we make of this journey from birth to death? How can we find meaning and joy amid our mortality and suffering?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780983294474
Publisher:	Etruscan Press
Publication date:	10/16/2012
Pages:	125
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Michael Blumenthal’s is the author of seven previous books of poetry, most recently And published by BOA Editions in 2009. A graduate of Cornell Law School and formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has just been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from the German, French and Hungarian and former psychotherapist, he spent a month in South Africa in May of 2007 working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation, an experience he has chronicled in Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine. His book-length account, “Because They Needed Me:” The Incredible Struggle of Rita Miljo To Save The Baboons of South Africa, will be published in Germany next year. Two of his other books, a collection of selected poems and a memoir, were also recently published in Germany and featured at The Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall of 2011. He is currently Visiting Professor of Law at The Universityof West Virginia College of Law.

Table of Contents

No Hurry

I Mixed Blessings

Atelier Rheingold 5

The Rabbi Writes a Marriage Poem 7

A Photo of Terezin 9

Lilac Nostalgia 11

Because Marriage Is Not for Romantics 13

Le Choix 14

Habitations 15

Sadness 19

In a Time of Economic Downturn, I Gaze Up at the Sky 20

The Human Condition 21

"And the Fish Swim in the Lake, And Do Not Even Own Clothing" 23

Gratitude 25

Genetics 26

Everybody Is Wonderful When They're Wonderful 28

Nostalgia for Paris 29

Poetry Love 30

Blessed 31

II Not the Soul

Not the Soul 35

Homage to Hugh Hefner 36

Samizdat's Muse 37

Civic Leaders 38

The Germans 39

Song of the Dow 40

Virtue 42

Self-Containment 44

Autobiography of a Face 45

Desire 46

Existential Couplets 47

Moles 49

III Be Kind

The Wounded 53

Weeping at the Oscars 54

The Words 55

Background Music 57

Pancakes 58

Motel on the Mountain 60

The Other Side of the Story 61

Here Is Your Striped Shirt 63

The Pigeon 64

The Past 66

Self-Help 68

Epithalamium: The Leaves 69

Be Kind 71

IV No Hurry

Hypochondria 75

Downhill 76

No Hurry 77

I Died 78

Two Arts 79

Two Short 80

I Think Constantly of Those Who Were Truly Great 81

The Nurse 82

Abstractions 83

For My Son, Reading Harry Potter 85

Redundancies of Evening 86

Homage to Charles Aznavour 87

Anthology 88

Written on the Day After My Sister's Death 89

For Grief Will Ultimately Have Its Way 90

Madden's Pond 92

The End of Sex 94

What Happened? 96

The Dead 97

Six Cheerful Couplets on Death 99

God's Window 100

Editorial Reviews

“What a terrific book this is! . . . [Blumenthal] thinks out loud for all of us, affirms and denies with wit, charm, and best of all, with what feels like hard-won accuracy.”
—Stephen Dunn

“Michael Blumenthal’s poetry never sits heavy on the reader yet is substantial, civilized, and capable of articulating the human condition, including its pains and losses, without melodrama, high sentence, or self-pity. No Hurry is a gorgeous book: the world of flesh, mind, and heart spoken through air and silk.”
—George Szirtes

“Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?”
—Lynn Freed

From the Publisher