Elegies and Vacations

A book of intense emotional power,Elegies & Vacations marks Hank Lazer's taking the resources of innovative poetry in new directions that are at once elegiac, skeptical, and spiritual. Eleven poems, no two alike,Elegies & Vacations is an ambitious attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, "to recreate the heart of poetry itself." Linking elegies to extended journal-like meditations,Elegies & Vacations asks "what the day may mean." At the heart of the book is a long poem, "Deathwatch for My Father," which tracks the poet's father's final months, testing out the capacities of innovative poetry in the face of the death of a loved one. The book explores relationships with the dead-from the poet's father, to John Cage, to Kenneth Burke, to George Oppen-while also, through family vacations, projecting forward to ask "to what are we ancestral." The opposed or apposed guiding lights of the book-John Ashbery and George Oppen-like the juxtaposed elegies and vacations, offer divergent modes of verbal and ethical grace. Informed by a Buddhist sensibility, as well as by the relativistic thinking of reform (and mystical) Judaism, Lazer's poems move through varying terrains of form, textuality, and geography, from Suzhou (China) to the Abacos (the Bahamas), from Diamond Head (Oahu) to Orono (Maine), from an extended portrait to a journal, from children's stories to a two-columned composition on the nature of literary history.