Skin

“‘How difficult to piece one observation / Into the next without hyperbole or minor lie,’ VanderMolen writes early in this book, his 12th, a testament to watchfulness.”

“VanderMolen offers in this finely polished 12th book an assembly of poems that are intricate and sturdy, woven with well-chosen strands of candor … The result is a work of abundant pleasures, a testament to art as affirmation of human life.”

“Robert VanderMolen finds and propounds the courage to hold himself accountable for the unaccountable consequences of Attention, of Vision. Thus his is a law without bounds and an unconditional mercy. The Sublime is always inappropriate, and VanderMolen delights in sublimity without shame. Honor him.”

“For over half a century now, Robert VanderMolen has been ‘shoring up the fragments’ of our increasingly pixelated lives to form some of the most surprising, original poems in the American pantheon. You won’t hear any of the usual notes in these pages, won’t sense the prevalent gestures. Though written by one of our most accomplished, these new poems contain the freshness of dawn-met bird song, of ‘something that rises up / Out of the murk of sleep and turns true.’ Gorgeous, mirror-polishing poems.”

“In the poetry of Robert VanderMolen you see a familiar American landscape from the side, and within a few poems, to get accustomed, you are walking beside him through the tall grass, listening to his confidential insights in their rigorous but easy-going stride. As a guide, he takes you to the spots where, if you’re quiet, you’ll observe all the compassion and endurance that migrates through his corner of the world, and through the rivers of his sensibility, where, as in his poem “Three Things,” “Beauty is relative, / Truth elusive, someone reported– / As a teenager I made it my motto.”

“Skin reflects earnestly on the miraculous moments found in the daily experiences of human life. Time and time again, these poems illuminate the cycles of human interaction alongside the slow-moving patterns of nature: “bark just separating / after nine thousand summers.” A speaker asks “Is everything too old or too new?” and the resounding answer is that it’s a bit of both. Colorless birds, “a deep sweep of wind,” and arrowheads found in a dying red oak all point to fragmented moments that make up what it means to stitch one’s life together. “Attentiveness is my best friend,” a speaker remarks off-handedly, but this affair with observation is earnest and real. Skin rewards the reader through a tacit understanding that everything in life is part of something larger that we can’t see: the endless “thoughts that slide / Into notice” where “In the chill of privacy / One seeks promise.”