Calling the Names
A windsock enclosing moments of life as elusive as the wind that cannot be contained, Mark Saba’s Calling the Names is anchored by lines with artfully knotted phrases that try to hold life, even if ultimately nothing but memory endures. The work is framed by consistent emphasis on the life's brevity, “a stammering heart, aware that it contains a finite number of beats.” Even in travel, Saba is alert to “all the places that didn’t record us.” Creating a lyrical kaleidoscope shifting with the rhythm of breathing and beating of the heart, Saba employs metaphor to form complex transformations. He also manages lines and stanzas to juxtapose silence and language as he records the “lost voice” of lives relegated to the back pages of newspapers with “songs without words, muffled but for this pen.” Saba is not afraid to examine “the sting of life” but finds hard won joy even though he knows that he will swing from “love to solitude again.” In a particularly memorable poem about the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, even though he must try, Saba reveals the impossibility of commenting on the massacre with a hand that “hovers over a useless alphabet.” In an attempt to record his life in time, Saba places himself in “the depths of unknowable oceans, the runoff of billions of emptied souls.” This is an important collection, and a necessary one, because Saba ties disparate experiences together with his overarching vision in moving and compassionate poems that create the bridge between life and death we all will cross.
VIVIAN SHIPLEY, Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and author of Perennial and The Poet
A windsock enclosing moments of life as elusive as the wind that cannot be contained, Mark Saba’s Calling the Names is anchored by lines with artfully knotted phrases that try to hold life, even if ultimately nothing but memory endures. The work is framed by consistent emphasis on the life's brevity, “a stammering heart, aware that it contains a finite number of beats.” Even in travel, Saba is alert to “all the places that didn’t record us.” Creating a lyrical kaleidoscope shifting with the rhythm of breathing and beating of the heart, Saba employs metaphor to form complex transformations. He also manages lines and stanzas to juxtapose silence and language as he records the “lost voice” of lives relegated to the back pages of newspapers with “songs without words, muffled but for this pen.” Saba is not afraid to examine “the sting of life” but finds hard won joy even though he knows that he will swing from “love to solitude again.” In a particularly memorable poem about the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, even though he must try, Saba reveals the impossibility of commenting on the massacre with a hand that “hovers over a useless alphabet.” In an attempt to record his life in time, Saba places himself in “the depths of unknowable oceans, the runoff of billions of emptied souls.” This is an important collection, and a necessary one, because Saba ties disparate experiences together with his overarching vision in moving and compassionate poems that create the bridge between life and death we all will cross.
VIVIAN SHIPLEY, Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and author of Perennial and The Poet
A windsock enclosing moments of life as elusive as the wind that cannot be contained, Mark Saba’s Calling the Names is anchored by lines with artfully knotted phrases that try to hold life, even if ultimately nothing but memory endures. The work is framed by consistent emphasis on the life's brevity, “a stammering heart, aware that it contains a finite number of beats.” Even in travel, Saba is alert to “all the places that didn’t record us.” Creating a lyrical kaleidoscope shifting with the rhythm of breathing and beating of the heart, Saba employs metaphor to form complex transformations. He also manages lines and stanzas to juxtapose silence and language as he records the “lost voice” of lives relegated to the back pages of newspapers with “songs without words, muffled but for this pen.” Saba is not afraid to examine “the sting of life” but finds hard won joy even though he knows that he will swing from “love to solitude again.” In a particularly memorable poem about the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, even though he must try, Saba reveals the impossibility of commenting on the massacre with a hand that “hovers over a useless alphabet.” In an attempt to record his life in time, Saba places himself in “the depths of unknowable oceans, the runoff of billions of emptied souls.” This is an important collection, and a necessary one, because Saba ties disparate experiences together with his overarching vision in moving and compassionate poems that create the bridge between life and death we all will cross.
VIVIAN SHIPLEY, Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and author of Perennial and The Poet
David Robert Books (2017)