A Cleft in the Rock

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.