Notes on the Creation by David Kann

It’s certainly unlike anything else out there in the poetry world — at least, anything in my surreal-modern post-Ashbery corner of it — so I must give the MS full credit for the courage of its stylistic convictions. The tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins is alive and well in these poems, along with the physicality of someone like James Dickey, with, perhaps, some of the thunder and heat of early Delmore Schwartz.

–James Cushing

This collection manages to encompass the ongoing paradox of creation and destruction. At the macro level some poems describe the vast, seven-step process of creation as offered in Genesis, their rich language and headlong momentum reflecting the violence and erotic lushness of the original mythology, while other poems focus on micro immediacies such as the speaker’s son’s first solo swim, or a dying bee. Together they revere the natural world but also take its Creator to task for allowing events such as the Holocaust, and ultimately they sympathize with a God who is “just another entity trying to get by” like the rest of us in a world full of human error and “betrayed stewardship.” Skeptical, despairing, awed and sometimes angry, these poems nevertheless embrace a flawed “creation” and reflect a persistent hope for its survival.

–Leslie Ullman, author of The You That All Along Has Housed You and Library of Small Happines