Recoveries by Peter Snow

Peter Snow, storyteller and poet, skillfully interweaves his narrative with a more lyrical voice.  Headed by Pascal’s famous dictum, ‘the heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about,’ these sixteen pieces invite us into a language that describes the world in the gaps between.  Mountains, a barking dog, a doctor polishing his glasses as he talks to patients give the reader some firm ground, yet such images returning page by page in a kind of musical metamorphosis challenge us either to surrender to those ‘reasons that we know nothing of’ or to stand bewildered.  The writer’s one-time work as a psychiatric nurse gives substance to his central theme… that a word filled with imagination can heal fragile minds and fractured relationships.  Reading this, another chamber in the heart begins to open.

–Paul Matthews, author of Sing Me the Creation and This Naked Light

When Recoveries asks, Our life in this world, what is it like? it provides no fill-in-the-blank answer.  It instead leads us past the faces of people and things and into what may exist underneath: the four (or possibly—somehow—five) chambers of the heart.  Whose heart?  Yours.  Ours.  The planet’s, shaking with the concussions of a war.  This book is like a vivid cross-section cut of the human experience—depending on whether you enter it as a tourist or a student, you will either be wowed or softly, insistently awoken.  Either way, this lost-in-time, thoughtful foray into beingness and love is generous with its quiet gifts.

–Elisabeth Blair, author of We He She/It and without saying

Recoveries plays along the wavering horizon that separates wakefulness and dream, with the sharp reality of the human mind hovering above, and the elusive vista of imaginings below.  Within this visionscape, Snow infuses a dramatic and compelling storyline, delving into spiritual and physical wellbeing, healing, complexities of the heart, and the nature of human cognizance.  Snow’s language, too, undulates between expert precision and evocative abstraction.  An expansive fountain of ideas surges through these elegant poems, and reaches beyond verisimilitude toward what we all most deeply understand to be true.

–Elaine Pentaleri, co-editor of Mud Season Review