Combinations of the
Universe
Albert Goldbarth
“The publication of a new Goldbarth
is what we used to call a happening, both far-out and groovy, even like
the Olympics or the World Series. Reading one of his books is like visiting
Disney World, Vegas, the Library of Congress, and Graceland all on the
same day. Poem after poem comes from seemingly inexhaustible stores of
learning, a terribly large heart, a serious sensibility and soul, and a
sense of humor that makes us laugh as well as come to feel, learn, know.”
—David Citino
In 2002, Albert Goldbarth became the
only writer to twice receive the National Book Critics Circle Award for
poetry. In so honoring Saving Lives, Joe David Bellamy said as part of
the NBCC citation, “If the essence of poetry is performing ‘feats of association,’
as Robert Frost used to claim, then Albert Goldbarth’s wild eclecticism
is high art indeed because Goldbarth finds startling and intricate connections
where no one else has thought to look. For him, nearly every poem is an
opportunity to encompass the universe in all its randomness and bizarre
beauty. He beguiles with many a bracing fact and with a conglomeration
of emotion one could hardly imagine co-existing in such proximity—a vast
architecture of desire and regret, anguish and knowledge, elation and elegy.”
Now, in a book whose subjects range
from the high gods of antiquity to the low blows of divorce-spite, and
whose strategies move from a seven-line poem about birth to a twenty-page
study of contemporary disjunction, Goldbarth expands triumphantly upon
his earlier work. For all its lively variety, however, Combinations of
the Universe is not so much a collection of separate pieces as a poet’s
version—steeped in our human sweat and dazzle—of the cutting-edge physicist’s
grand attempt to unify the far-flung elements of our human condition.
In these pages you’re invited to join
Rembrandt; Petrarch; painter Mary Cassatt, whose “looking never lied”;
a retired astronaut; a number of flying saucer contactees; a baseball that’s
really the Buddha; and the rest of the various population here (including
your neighbors), on an adventure in twenty-first-century poetry. Combinations
of the Universe is a gala volume from a writer of whom Judith Kitchen, in
Georgia Review, said, “he just may be the American poet of his generation
for the ages.”
Albert Goldbarth is Distinguished Professor
of Humanities in the Department of English at Wichita State University.
He is author of over twenty collections of poetry.
