Poeima Poetry

Habitation of Wonder is an offering of poems that travels the intersection of the natural landscape and the landscape of spirit. Here, the moon is a "white comma / in the breath of space." Crocuses are "ephemeral prophets, first of the sun's spring projects." The ocean is "a vast / perpetual sacrifice on the altar / of the shell-glittering shore." The collection opens with "Genesis," a reimagining of the creation story with song as the divine instrument of creation. Five themed sections flow from "Genesis" like a musical thread, investigating the material elements from which we originate and in which we take shelter, as well as the gifts of language and faith, which make us more than merely "a constellation of salts." In its own way, each poem invites the reader to "tenant beauty"--as well as to tenant uncertainty. When beauty and uncertainty collide, they spark wonder. As these poems suggest, wonder is simply another name for the world in which we live--and the world that lives in us.

Ash & Embers embodies the inherent messiness of life's journey, sorting detritus from treasures, identifying and naming memory, finding categories that reflect life's winding pathways and its treacherous footing. Taking his various roles--son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, neighbor, teacher, citizen, believer, writer, and reader--as narrative stances, Zoller considers the details of life and its larger forces. Thematically complex, Ash & Embers accepts that the journey is translated through the often difficult tool of language; thus, it embraces the tension that language is inadequate, alien, and, paradoxically, a tool for recognition and understanding. In Zoller's poems how we speak about life--as physical passage, as spiritual pilgrimage, as imagined patterns, as emotional canvas, as interwoven narrative strands, and as social construct--all these voices meet in one conversation. Between "Photographs" that begins the book and "Hard Copy" that brings it to a close we find everything from first impressions to "Second Knowings," from notes on the poems of Mao and Seamus Heaney to prayers to the God of time, eternity, and love.

Poems of nature and childhood initiate this poetic journey of the heart. The loss of family and friends prompts the search for divine relation. Pastoral lyrics, elegies, and colloquies culminate in the "necessary" breaking of the heart as it mystically "hatches" and the Incarnate life shines through.

In Second Bloom, Silver looks unflinchingly and honestly at the suffering of cancer, while at the same time celebrating the possibility of joy, the persistence of beauty and love, the simultaneous winnowing and comfort of faith. These poems are contemplative and often personal, but reach out to the world as a whole: from IV poles to hula hoops, from riding a roller coaster with one's son to comforting a dying friend at Christmas. The poems glean their subject matter from ordinary life, from art, from the natural world. Silver's poetry attempts to preserve the world's luminous moments and to hold grace and despair simultaneously in the human heart.