Tourist at a Miracle

Poetry. "It's very rare to watch the birth of a new style. It's like watching through a new set of Proust's kaleidoscopes. Mark Statman has been working for years on a vision of himself and parts of the city concentrated and bare as any poetry. It's hard to compare it to anything except a commentary on the real and the imagined pointillist poems almost without figures and adjectives and false decorations. But it all adds up, like a fire hydrant taken by Rudy Burkhardt, because everything is unexaggerated, convincing as a street sign. He has gotten away from any lyric leftovers, and in his anti-anti-poems he makes a lot of magic and music out of elegies of a city mouse. He has a family, a loved wife, and son, and a past he has a constant politics and is not seduced by the political. He makes us bewildered tourists at his everyday miracle"--David Shapiro.