The Inextinguishable

"Nothing will perish" claims The Inextinguishable, a book that stares wide-eyed at suffering, and yet wants to shout as loudly as it can: what death? Sunning themselves in Homer's light, in Shakespeare's, in the hidden radiance of childhood and middle age, in the luster of what is, of what will always be, these poems mourn when they must, and yet wish nothing more than to become still louder instruments of celebration and gratitude: There is rain. There is this day. There is this day and no other. Praise it with trumpets and zithers. Praise it however you can.

Review :
"The challenge of celebrating the poems of Michael Lavers' The Inextinguishable is not one of where to begin but one, rather, of where to end. These pages, with all of their probing music, supple phraseology, lyric virtuosity, and unmistakable sensibility, succeed not simply from the performance of mastery but from the manifestation of grace. The Inextinguishable is among the most nourishing collections I have read in years. One suspects that Wordsworth, had he been formed by 21st-century North America, would sound something like this." -Malachi Black "I'd have thought these the lost poems of Alyosha Karamazov, come to light when so much poetry seems to have been written by Ivan. The relentless lovingness of Michael Lavers' poems at first tempted me to draw back, as an implicit judgement on whatever in me is unloving or petty or merely clever. But I couldn't withdraw, since the poems-like love itself-simultaneously forgive the failures they reveal, and show us we are better than we know. I worry that The Inextinguishable will be hard to take for readers who turn to poetry for a reflection of their own discontent and alienation. He is at home in beauty and joy. Lavers' joyousness, though, is not a matter of attitudinizing but of formal technique. The variety of his rhythms and shapeliness of his lines and stanzas is love concretely embodied. And his cadences everywhere invite the presence of the departed greats they echo, and show him perfectly at home in their company. A sterner challenge will be the book's central thesis: that nothing, nothing will be lost. But it is a truth, and at least one of these poems already deserves a place among the inextinguishable poems of the English Language. You'll know it when you see it." -John Talbot "The Inextinguishable is a book of the biggest, oldest, questions: Why are we here? What are we for? What is enough? To make the old resonate in a way that is bruising, clarifying, stunning-this is poetry's greatest task. And Michael Lavers seems made for it, writing poems that capture life flung like a coin, spinning so quickly between grief and delight that the two are indistinguishable. Here we are shown how moments of chaos, of oblivion, of soft vague time crystallize into 'small bright true things'-eglantine, river-gleam, Verdi, yellow finches, a marriage, children. 'It's enough, and it is never enough, this life, ' we are told at one point, and what could be truer? To use words like sweeping, sublime, and dazzling is to risk cliché. And yet. Anything true is worth saying. The Inextinguishable is simply magnificent. I have never read so many perfect poems so close together. I didn't want the book to end, and luckily, a book like this never really does. This is poetry to have absolute faith in. This kind of poetry is what language is for." -Claire Wahmanholm