Praise
for Tourist at a Miracle:
“It’s very rare to watch the birth of a new
style. It’s like watching through a new set of Proust’s
kaleidoscopes.
Mark Statman has been working for years on a vision of
himself and parts of the city—concentrated and
bare as any poetry. It’s hard to compare it to anything
except a commentary on the real and the imagined—
pointillist poems almost without figures and adjectives
and false decorations. But it all adds up, like a fire
hydrant taken by Rudy Burkhardt, because everything is
unexaggerated, convincing as a street sign. He has
gotten away from any lyric leftovers, and in his anti-anti-poems
he makes a lot of magic and music out of
elegies of a city mouse. He has a family, a loved wife,
and son, and a past—he has a constant politics and
is
not seduced by the political. He makes us bewildered tourists
at his everyday miracle.”—David
Shapiro
“Tourist
at a Miracle is a big title to live up
to. Mark Statman delivers the tourist’s wonder and
distance in
spare, deliberate music—American poetry’s grand
plain style descended from William Carlos Williams
and James Schuyler. His miracles are those we all experience
if we have our eyes and feelings open—love,
friendship, fatherhood, loss, anxieties, frustrations,
fears...the everyday and always. Statman is a head-on
poet willing to risk clarity in pursuit of the marvelous
we might encounter anywhere.”—William
Corbett
“‘The letters glow like ghosts’ concludes
Mark Statman’s poem ‘Losing Buttons’ which
is a memorable and
a signifying cipher of how every gesture and commonplace,
every person and place known has its negative,
reverse, absent “one left out,” the “what
I’m not seeing’’ ‘second question.’ The
poems in Tourist at a Miracle attend to the enigma of how it is ‘the other half
is still unknown’ imply the indescribable silence
and loss
when the baseball game on the radio is suddenly turned
off. Yet, evident, everyday things are engaged with,
loved and seen. ‘Yellow Jerusalem artichoke/Jesse
said.’ The hard, fast quick chasms of Statman’s
particular
urban topography register in a stripped down intimacy that
shares a propensity with James Schuyler for
splices of weather, signals of season ‘winter facts’ obliquely
seen. These poems compel us to notice instances
of being in shorthand like (my favorite) ‘syrup,
algebra, love’ amid the ‘heights, lost, heights
/ resolve, view,
found.’”
—Kimberly
Lyons
“The way to redeem the world, Mark Statman writes, ‘is
not to fall in love / but to stay in love / to use
the word love / every day in your life / and mean it.’ How
surprising, and how wonderful, to find a poet
who builds meaning this way, and insists on meaning what
love means. In Tourist at a Miracle, Statman
gives us language as commitment, commitment as imagination,
imagination as soul-making. Statman has
translated Lorca brilliantly, and here he gives us a version
of New York that Lorca would recognize and
welcome. This book is a delight.”—Joseph
Lease