Books
The First Night We Thought the World Would End
Poems by George Yatchisin
There is much to appreciate about George Yatchisin’s poems, but what I admire most is the free ranging nature of this collection, the expansiveness with which the poet engages the ordinary. With lyric intensity, Yatchisin investigates the world—whether he’s writing about film, music, memory, or science; the personal or the observed. Because “poetry was everywhere and random,” he reminds us that “…if you look./Look closer.” It’s this looking closer and his ability to bring to life the details in clear and often beautiful language that urges us to keep reading these poems.
—Gerry LaFemina, author of The Story of Ash
“There’s the idea the heart is a museum” and George Yatchisin’s poems reveal the intention of a collector who adds “each day a wing to the museum.” Yatchisin invites us to pause, to consider the things that snag inside us. His poems move like essays; they gather the ribbons, work out the knots. He writes of “arugula, bosc, butternut, saffron,/sundrieds, shitakes—an alphabet of exotics”; of popular culture: baseball, Batman, fifties films, and The Clash; of Ovid, Blake, and Thomas Aquinas; and even the most ordinary subjects: a cement truck, a decoy duck, roadkill, muskrats, and dead fish: “If I could excise my heart like boning a perch/with one steel clean thrust, I would lay it down/among those hungry eyes.” His poetry has sharp knife skills, carving to the essential. Aligned to a James Wright aesthetic, Yatchisin’s poems reflect how “language clear as water still lets us see ourselves.” Each poem is a bead strung like a sequence of days, “handing over a string/of now and now and now,” each line the ticking of a clock, each poem a notch, a pulse. A boy crouched inside a museum-heart asks, “Please, there is a permission I seek,/a keeping I need, a past I pray for/and tenderly, daily, poorly teach myself to mend.” There’s a gathering feeling to this book; meditative and lyrical, his poems contemplate a range of wonders from the minutiae to the grand, man-made or natural, solitary or shared, because “poetry [is] everywhere and random.” And of that pulsing, a color-splash that merges and blurs, Yatchisin urges us to consider “How much of/our lives are an abstract painting, where even beauty/seems too much to answer for, all we can ask.”
Of course George Yatchisin’s poems are mouthwatering — here is a poet who cares deeply about meals, libations and all of the human rituals that are marked and enhanced by them. But, Feast Days is the work of a master poet, not a chef or a vintner. Ginger root, onions, IPAs, truffles, “brisket and bourbon” — all of these constitute the content of these exquisite poems, but at the heart of this feast are dazzling images, sonic depth that comes when one is in the presence of a first-rate singer and percussionist, and the beautifully-choreographed rhythms of someone who really knows how to dance with words and lines. George Yatchisin knows how to plate a poem, and is wise enough to relish every moment in the process of doing so. This is memorable, distinguished work.
—Rick Benjamin, Former State Poet Laureate of Rhode Island
Big Enough for Words: Poems & vintage photographs from California’s Central Coast
Online anthology edited by David Starkey, George Yatchisin, and Chryss Yost
Excerpt from the anthology’s introduction, written by George Yatchisin:
