Poetry

Between what’s perceived and how one adds meaning spells a moment of infinite duration, an admixture of sense and thinking, of mirror-clear images and impressionistic language. “A Message Back...” reads like an infinity sign, an unending process of journey and return, specific identity and underlying oneness, the poetry of open thinking in time of war. With provocative borrowings and stinging insights, Leonard Schwartz transcribes an unforgettable conversation.

I was delighted by this shrewd and cadenced meditation on the doubleness of postmodern life, a negotiation between eye and mirror, flesh and mass media.  As the Iraq War plays grievously in the background, refrains like , “Familiar ground is a foreign land” and “Mirrors are the enemies of aura,” weave throughout the text, reminding us of our distance from the very ground we stand on.    We are “at the edge of something’s definition,” not quite being and not yet image.  Being “between,” we pick a real strawberry on a “defamiliarized hill,” and it tastes like a TV screen.  I was excited to read this book and grateful for its moral playfulness; the experience throughout is one of elation, discovery, and unavoidably, woe.