Visual, auditory, tactile-ever attentive to perception-Lawrence Joseph's third book of poems, Before Our Eyes, generously, almost exotically, blends various tones, atmospheres, and textures into forms of concentrated, pitch-perfect invention. The poet, an astute aesthetician, is also astutely conscious of history, a critical observer of public life. He explores the American identity. He investigates meaning and language. He celebrates the mysteries of beauty and love. The result is a poetry of illuminating effects, which captures a profound sense of what it's like to be alive, and what it means to write poetry, in a radically changing time.
"In a feast of opposites and tangents, the sensual, the intellectual, the visual, the political and even the corporate and legal come together in Joseph's poems to create a voice so rich and intelligent that it can be hard work to follow. But it is effort that pays off in luminous observations and revelations, reminding us that this is the stuff for which we turn to poetry in the first place."
