Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems

Description

(Chax Press, 2025)

 

Portions, spirit, elegy, lyrics, awakenings, sutra, serendipity, loss, mindedness, rebelling, reveling, unraveling, sounderings, melody, offkey, noisily, rhythm, negation, improvisation, abandon, deflection, renewal, cascade, cadence, grace, weaving, enigma, shekinah: a door, a jar. These are a few of his favorite things.

— Charles Bernstein

Hank Lazer’s Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems shows how Lazer thinks with and through writing. All of it is literally experimental in that each new project is a challenge he gives himself, a way to experience life differently. Here we have his “shape writing” but also short, jagged lyrics reminiscent of Creeley, and long narrative poems about losing one’s parents. What unites this work is Lazer’s joint commitment to mindfulness (a quest to find the sacred within the everyday) and to relationality, to dialogue. His books arise and exist in conversation with others: philosophers—such as Levinas and Merleau-Ponty—as well as Zen monks, and admired poets including Emily Dickinson and Creeley. This work may be heady, but it is also deeply human.  

— Rae Armantrout

Hank Lazer’s Deathwatch for my Father (2004) changed my life, giving me access to grieving through poetry, using others’ words as well as my own, tracked in diary form. For decades, he has been my guide in spirit and in sound, gathering simplicity across years of poetic and zen practice. I am grateful for this selection from his work of the last quarter century, the way it records one heart-mind, moment after moment, always in the present, yet becoming history in its accretions. Word by word he ties—and unravels—the knots (and nots) of existence. By the end each word feels luminous, empty in the Buddhist sense. We’re left with a substantial, and wise, book by a marvelous, humane, poet.   

—Susan Schultz

Hank Lazer’s Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems is a book of books, a Golgonooza of dozens of notebooks. Lazer’s poems are a daily practice whether of Jewish prayer, Zen meditation, early morning contemplation, or just plain poetry making— the active sense of rebalancing, setting himself and his readers to rights. Joining his thought we join the family: we become intimates with his grandmothers and uncle. The deathwatch elegies for his father and mother, deft and warm but unsentimental, frame the collection like pillars. Lazer is a man of words inspired by the words and music of others; his great gift is to receive. The poems skirt and skim Heidegger and Levinas, quote Creeley and Lyn Hejinian, are inspired by Monk and Coltrane, by kabbalah and Dogen, but also the prayer notes of his late Uncle Stan and rediscovered 1970’s letters from his grandfather Chaim who anguished over war and peace. Inspired by both Genesis and Zen practice, Lazer is in love with beginnings. The poems originate from handwritten notebooks and range in form from abstract improvisational shape-writing, to tight homages to Creeley, to freely sprawling pages, to left margin stanzas. Always though there is a scent of mind renewing itself, a mind responsive to the immediate moment— but reflecting on the whole

thinking / is the real / dancing its way / inward

and the continuity of that mind as it responds to current events over the past twenty-four years is a steady marvel at the center of a massive swirl of stars, abundant life indeed.    

—Rodger Kamenetz