A Cleft in the Rock

<p>Marc Kaminsky's <em>A Cleft in the Rock</em> is a monumental achievement. At home in no world Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work passionate and visceral inscribes itself so readily in typological time the perpetual present of Biblical story psalm and creation myth. Meticulously grounded-in Yiddishkeit the maelstrom of the family wholehearted married love the struggles of the aging body-these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to live/with catastrophe in the world/of signs and wonders. His book is itself a cleft in the rock a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human.  -D. Nurkse</p><p></p><p>Sample:</p><p></p><p>In Eldorado Springs</p><p></p><p><em>He opened a rock and water flowed;</em></p><p><em>in the desert rivers ran.</em></p><p><em>  -Psalm 105</em></p><p></p><p>Walking along a trail</p><p>at the edge of a precipice</p><p>you turned as each new</p><p>wonder came into view</p><p></p><p>to show me your face</p><p>bursting into soundless</p><p>laughter your eyes</p><p>communicated intensities</p><p></p><p>of delight and awe</p><p>that spoke to my whole</p><p>body like drum language</p><p>and placed me in the scale</p><p></p><p>of things never seen before.</p><p>With each step I entered</p><p>the area of your surprise-</p><p>a vein of wilderness</p><p></p><p>through which shy rattlesnakes</p><p>slip in and out of the sun</p><p>and we become unobtrusive</p><p>so as not to disturb</p><p></p><p>the solitude of the mountain</p><p>lion and the green pastures</p><p>where elk come out</p><p>in the open to rut.</p>