"We've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact, Somehow calls out with our words to make phrases, to mythologize our existence, to speak for us."—Jerry Schwartz, Home Planet News
Burt Kimmelman: Somehow

 

“Burt Kimmelman is a poet who obviously admires the clarity of classical Chinese poetry and strives for it in his tight syllabics and in his shifting images of light and dark. In doing so, he finds what is luminously transcendent in the routines of everyday life.”—Harvey Shapiro

“These poems evince a quality infrequently encountered in contemporary American poetry: modesty, an attentive and forthright modesty. As such they are unassailable. They cannot be tarnished by our times’ endemic disease, the irony disease. The results of that disease, under a sheen of wit and suavity, are hectic and finally a heat death of harlequin vocabulary collapsed upon itself. But these poems cannot be tarnished or contaminated. Hence their most frequent subjects—the poet’s New Jersey landscape (birds in trees and sky) and the poet’s daughter (her birth and young years)—are not made “subject,” not made into mere textual occasions. Instead, they are given occasion—place and space in the poems—and speak to us as they will. Modesty in an age of irony is infrequent, rare, i.e., valuable, i.e., worth our own best attention. These poems are 'worth it.'” —John Taggart

“Burt Kimmelman’s poems flourish as they pivot from a repertoire of reiterated subjects—works of art, natural landscapes, family, the animal world—to a transfiguring notion of their properties and possibilities. For over twenty-five years, this practice has produced dynamic patterns of insight, patterns comprised of recurring figures and forms which nevertheless shift in their relations to his poetic witness.”—Jon Curley, Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

“Somehow achieves a rare purity. Few contemporary poets so gracefully demonstrate classic notions of what the practice of poetry must be: Kimmelman’s work is carefully wrought, with concision, focus, and the rhythm of musical composition. . . ..”—Madeline Tiger, Jacket

"The poems in Somehow have the spiritual resonance of a talented poet humble before nature, love, and language. In engaging a world larger than himself, Burt Kimmelman offers us poems that feel like a gift."—Deborah Diemont, NewPages

“In Somehow everything comes together so beautifully you will just feel sad it’s ended. . . .” —Kevin Killian, Amazon.com: About Kevin Killian: Reviews

“For readers who want to relax at night and read poems that soothe and celebrate, Kimmelman makes a good bedside companion.” —Camille-Yvette Welsch, ForeWord

"We've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact, Somehow calls out with our words to make phrases, to mythologize our existence, to speak for us." —Jerry Schwartz, Home Planet News

“[…] Kimmelman can sink into a moment, where a household, familial scene opens into a deeper profundity, where daily survival is a sort of triumph […].” —Kenneth Hart, Journal of New Jersey Poets

“[…] Kimmelman focuses on daily experiences in ways that makes us take another look at them. He steps back to ponder, and in so doing, makes us do the same.”—William Allegrezza, Galatea Resurrects

About The Pond at Cape May Point

". . . a series of keen lyric observations. . . . rare in its acceptance and direct presentation of a place.” —Jason Macey, Et Al

“. . . a lyrical splendor. Kimmelman’s deft poems—their lightness, their space, their languidness—beautifully match Caruso’s evocative water colors.”—Water Color Painting Book Reviews

“. . . the fine and gentle writing of Burt Kimmelman. . . .” —Chris Mansel, Muse Apprentice Guild

“The poetry of Kimmelman is precise and compact in its language, but creates vast scenery before the reader."—Denise Bazzett, New Pages

“Once every now and then one comes upon something that is simply beautiful and this book is such art.” —Michael Basinski, The Hold

“. . . a rare evocation of a luminous place indeed.” —Robert Creeley

“. . . as quiet an experience as anyone could wish for.” —Cid Corman

About Musaics

“A very welcome new poet—artful, fastidious, learned—in love with the world of painting and the intricacies of language.” —Alfred Kazin

“In Burt Kimmelman’s poems, form calls deeply to form, as though the works of art, the paintings and sculptures of the titles, lifted one to the very brim of language where one could speak . . . of a life caught whole.” —Michael Heller

ISBN 0-9759197-0-9 $12.95

Letter to My Dead Brother

I suppose letters to the dead are common.
We need to speak, even when no one’s there.
I think of the crazy juxtapositions, the people
and things you loved. Life is a mute grieving.
That’s all I can ever say. I have a picture
of you holding Jane at six months, holding
her bottle to her mouth. She used to cry
to herself, a baby when her mother was away.
I’d become afraid. What could I do?
There are objects we inherit from the dead.
They make a strange language we speak
with astonishing clarity — we’re surprised by it
yet there it is. The world, its textures, we cherish
them — we cling to them and live out the story.
You never learned how children keep our time.
They don’t know us but our words, our faces
shape a world — and we, as if peering out
from behind it, understand how death forms
love, how the photograph becomes memory.
There is a connection that takes the place of
holding one another. I remember you when
Jane puts her arms around my neck. I feel
her warm breath, the blood coursing along.