Poems of celebration and meditation on the power and fragility of the world that allows for beauty, love, and sorrow.
Reading Michael Blanchard's The Things of This World, I was reminded again and yet again of Walt Whitman's famous line, "Who touches this touches a man." Blanchard's poems bring us into the presence of a genuinely humane person, a poet who speaks with the modesty of deep experience and well-honed craft. This poet practices what might be called a spiritual poetry, a poetry that opens our eyes and hearts to profound mysteries of being. His explorations of the transformational moments of perception and memory remind me at times of the Chinese masters and at others of the Christian mystics - but always the poems resonate with his own unique and carefully-modulated voice. As Blanchard himself writes in the title poem: "The true reckoning / of this world / is the way we come / to know things twice: / in the wonder first / and then the remembering." The Things of This World is a wonder-filled and memorable collection.
-Michael Hettich, Author, A Sharper Silence and The Halo of Bees
In his most powerful collection to date, Michael David Blanchard gracefully blends the philosophical, the reflective, and the personal, all with a scholar's eye for the telling detail and a poet's ear for the music in language. With his precise control over form, he creates free verse rich in sensory imagery, discovery, and intellectual depth - haunting, immersive, and exacting. Rooted in Southern sensibilities, these poems frequently meditate on memory and aging but also reach further to conjure landscapes both physical and emotional, from the "Big Muddy" to "the house that no longer stands." Through the alchemy of words and empathy, Blanchard calls us to a reckoning, even as he invites us into poems sustained by the tension between loss and love, thought and feeling, the here and the gone. At the heart of these evocative pieces lies his quiet truth, captured in a line from the opening poem: "everything else we lose / but love anyway."
-Claire Hamner Matturro, Associate Editor, Southern Literary Review
