Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer
Beginning with his first book, Shouting at No One, in 1983, through to his most recent, So Where Are We?, in 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph's poetry "of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness " (John Ashbery), each poem "an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth" (Yusef Komunyaka). Joseph's poems comprise one of the most essential and visionary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. No other American poet covers the territory Joseph does. Joseph invents a spacious language global in ambition, paying close attention to power structures that are violent and create violence, bearing witness to the velocities of historical change embodied in endless wars, unleashed capital, racism, and ecological destruction. But Joseph's poetry also reflects a sensual intimacy driven by an awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love and justice are indistinguishable. Joseph has written an ongoing chronicle of what it means to write poetry in the turbulent times in which we live. His ever-new, always alive interactions of shifting thoughts, voices and languages--impacted by his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic heritage, his professional life as a lawyer and legal scholar, and the economies of a world of working class labor from which he comes--imagine the depths of our common experience on multilayered spatial and temporal planes. Meticulously crafted and formed, intellectually and emotionally fierce and challenging, phenomenally aligning sight to sound and observation to feeling, displaying a love of line, shape, and painterly color, Joseph's poems press back against the high-stakes pressures of our time with a moral and aesthetic intensity not easily forgotten.