A Cleft in the Rock

Marc Kaminsky's A Cleft in the Rock is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded-in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body-these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to "live/with catastrophe in the world/of signs and wonders." His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human.  -D. Nurkse

Sample:

In Eldorado Springs

He opened a rock and water flowed;

in the desert rivers ran.

  -Psalm 105

Walking along a trail

at the edge of a precipice,

you turned as each new

wonder came into view

to show me your face

bursting into soundless

laughter, your eyes

communicated intensities

of delight and awe

that spoke to my whole

body like drum language

and placed me in the scale

of things never seen before.

With each step, I entered

the area of your surprise-

a vein of wilderness

through which shy rattlesnakes

slip in and out of the sun

and we become unobtrusive

so as not to disturb

the solitude of the mountain

lion and the green pastures

where elk come out

in the open to rut.