Gliding by Peter Solet

Pete Solet‘s fine new chapbook Gliding spans time in a quizzically almost epic manner…such masterful economy is allowed only through a language that is elegantly elastic and exact at once. But this tale is more than of a boy’s coming manhood. Generations stand honestly in place and do not falter. Mother, father, lover—lyric instances that flash like knives in the starlight.  These are the lives that kept on walking (and confronting) cold and solitary terrain, as one by one the characters try on the underworld: that secret place that only the child suspects fully, and for true— for it is that boy or girl who has lived within It.   Solet generously makes room for the living and the dead, and each owns a resilience that: …”even a thousand knifes couldn’t do you in/ anymore than wakefulness can kill a dream.” Experience this dream uniquely written. Nowhere else might one discover twenty-six pages that shimmer with such textured and ancient portraiture.

–Katherine Soniat, author of Bright Stranger and The Swing Girl

The poet James Wright once said that he aspired “to write the poems of a grown man.” Peter Solet has given us such poems in Gliding. With discipline and grace, Solet takes up subjects both urban and rural, tracing the ancient ways of love and grief, of hope, of steadfastness and faith, in poems that speak to us in an intimate tone that makes us feel their many insights are our own. What a beautiful book.

—Richard Hoffman, Author of Gold Star Road, Emblem, and Noon until Night

These poems are like one of those shrugs a man gives when you’ve asked him a question whose answer is too wide and deep for the words it might manage. You know that the meals, the stories, the captured moments, and blunt interrogations of the divine that fill this book are the carefully unpacked contents of that shrug, and you are honored to be let in on these answers. They are earned answers, answers that balance their explorations and hungers the way a tree’s crown and roots are balanced—by necessity and by nature. Like the kid in “Soliloquy,” the poems all accept the world in its streetlamp half-light as well as its examination-room-glare: “this place is ok / i go along.” They may “weep for the love of the bearing..,” but they also lift the bearing upwards, always, always toward light.

–Devon Miller-Duggan, Author of Pinning the Bird to the Wall and Neither Prayer, Nor Bird