Mother Ship by Paul Jaskunas

 

“With stunning imagery and patient, skillful syntax, these poems shimmer and brim with feeling. Here, we are intimate with mystery inside tea and clouds, in news of a death across the sea, in a bedroom slipper ‘walking the current with uneven steps’ down the Lethe river, in gathering chanterelles while learning Lithuanian words for ‘blueberry/ pine/ birch’.

 

I trust the intimate voice of these poems when it warns of our collective noise and ecological teetering as much as I do when the speaker leans towards a boozy giant stranger on a train, toasting to ‘euros, to dollars, to Mercedes Benz.’ This is a poet of imagination and deep compassion, conjuring a world where dreamlike imagery reveals truths underneath the oblivion of our days. Somehow, these poems meet the immensity of our moment on earth by making of our collective ecological disasters a myth of which we are the tragic center. As ‘We passersby/ yet smile and nod and shake/ hands with a feral future/ just now beginning to snarl.’ This is a book of poems I will hold close and return to again and again.”

 –Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal

 

“In Mother Ship, Paul Jaskunas ferries back and forth across oceanic Lethes, singing of the warp of time, its disappointments and erasures. Pondering ‘the minor key of the age,’ he invites us to inhabit the lacunae between real and ideal, memory and forgetfulness, impermanence and endurance, always bringing to bear the poignant knowledge that all ‘wholes and halves / will vanish in the / indivisible sky.’”

–Malachi Black, author of Storm Toward Morning

 

“At once meditative, opinionated, political and personal, the poems in Mother Ship offer us rich rhythms and melodies accompanied by luscious and surprising images. These are poems of juxtaposition: urban/rural/mythic/earthy, set in both Europe and America. There are surprising turns and alignments—a poem about the vulnerable snow leopard, for example, asks us to imagine parallel vulnerabilities of books, readers, and language itself. All are uncannily possible in the hands of a poet who navigates both hope and apocalypse with equanimity. Paul Jaskunas invites us, in a poem with the same title, to ‘Come to the Table’ where we are waited for, and as he says in the poem, ‘There is no time to waste.’”

–Jennifer Wallace, author of Raising the Sparks

 

“‘[O]f what is our hour worthy?’ Paul Jaskunas asks in Mother Ship. One’s place in the passage of time—reckoned by both memory and forgetting—is the theme that knits together this marvelous collection. Jaskunas delicately probes the ways humans ravage the planet to create ‘the fractured melodies / of our slow catastrophe.’ Even in the face of catastrophe, though, the Mother Ship of Jaskunas’s title poem commands survivors: ‘Stay afloat.’ An especially haunting group of poems set in post-Soviet Eastern Europe—with its mushroom hunts, Lenin statues, and garrulous BMW dealers—explores what happens next. Paul Jaskunas asks the big questions with rare humility and genuine grace: Mother Ship is a collection to treasure.

–Katherine E. Young, author of Woman Drinking Absinthe, Poet Laureate emerita, Arlington, VA