Riptide

Van Hartmann's Riptide pulls us in with its generosity of sensory details and musical language; it keeps us there with its reasonable heart. Elegiac in tone, tempered by flashes of wry humor, these poems reveal dangers "twisting in the sudden light," confess the "smallness within us," consider "what is possible and what is not." The speaker looks back to look forward and offers us what he's found there, the burden of "memory torn / from Eden that weighs on my heart like gold." -John Hoppent...