A Cleft in the Rock
Marc Kaminsky's A Cleft in the Rock 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
Sample:
In Eldorado Springs
He opened a rock and water flowed;
in the desert rivers ran.
-Psalm 105
Walking along a trail
at the edge of a precipice,
you turned as each new
wonder came into view
to show me your face
bursting into soundless
laughter, your eyes
communicated intensities
of delight and awe
that spoke to my whole
body like drum language
and placed me in the scale
of things never seen before.
With each step, I entered
the area of your surprise-
a vein of wilderness
through which shy rattlesnakes
slip in and out of the sun
and we become unobtrusive
so as not to disturb
the solitude of the mountain
lion and the green pastures
where elk come out
in the open to rut.
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