Over the course of his distinguished career, Michael Burkard has drawn praise from poets as diverse as John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Jean Valentine, James Tate, Tomas Transtrmer, and Timothy Liu for a poetry that "returns us to a primary strangeness." This selection offers Burkard aficionados and those new to his work an opportunity to encounter what Ashbery has praised as Burkard's "urgent messages from a distant galaxy." According to poet-critic Ethan Paquin, Burkard's poems "break from reality and American lyrical status quo to offer timeless, elegant revelations." Envelope of Night features an insightful foreword by the author, generous selections from five early books (the out-of-print collections In a White Light, Ruby for Grief, The Fires They Kept, Fictions from the Self and None, River) and "A Thief in the Lamp," a compelling, book-length section of previously unpublished poems that provides crucial insight into the trajectory of the development of Burkard's work. This definitive volume is an essential record of the achievements of a major American writer and a dazzling litmus of the range of the poetic mind.
Review :
Only a handful of poets live on the earth at any given time, and I believe Michael Burkard to be one of them. What a joy-and how humbling-to be confronted by an artist who has utterly abandoned himself to beauty and truth." --Denis Johnson
Poets whose principle source of inspiration is a well of deep sorrow, as Burkard's is, tend to avoid sentimentality either by tempering their feeling with formal rigor and stylistic complexity or else simply by rendering it too raw and frayed around the edges to be thought mawkish or soft. Rambling, hard-hitting, and sometimes downright bizarre ( I am hugging myself to death, declarative,/ ... like/ a moist nun ), Burkard most often takes the latter approach, but at his sharpest and best, he demonstrates how the two ways of keeping pathos in check can, in fact, cooperate: I am so tired/ of disagreeing/ I almost want death/ once, twice/ want death to get it/ over with, over there/ here, light or not. This retrospective gathers poems from five of Burkard's early books, 47 previously uncollected poems and a brief author's preface. While a greater selectiveness would have intensified the impact of this volume and many of the poems in it, Burkard probably shouldn't be read for the scrupulousness of his editing but for his appealing introspection, hard-won wisdom, dreamy turns, authentic emotionality and for the pleasure of encountering, here and there, those poems in which all his strengths including rigor and complexity come together. (Apr.) --Publishers Weekly, April 21, 2008
"Envelope of Night is a highly welcome selection of Michael Burkard's work up to 1990; this poet - like Fanny Howe - writes work that over all the years seems whole, uinterrupted, deeply 'meant to be.' Burkard lets his poems walk all around the Sphinx and bring back what we need most: her questions." --Jean Valentine
