And

A new collection of Whitmanesque poems by the winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award.

Publishers Weekly

Few new books of American poems have more unity-or more happiness-than the latest from Blumenthal: the law professor, memoirist, novelist (Dusty Angel) and psychotherapist has set himself the daunting task of depicting joy in all its varieties. Almost all the poems use long unrhymed lines and long sentences; all the titles begin with "And." Many titles read like updates on biblical verse ("And Whose Is the Triumph of Stinky Similitude? And Where Is the Rapture of the Seas?"), as if Blumenthal were writing his own book of psalms. His extended praise includes the spiritual ("he knows// that the air is rife with the anarchy of the possible,/ that the hills are moving, ever so secretly, during/ the night") but also the erotic and the familial: his poems about love almost dare us to call them sentimental. Blumenthal has long made the positive emotions, those that risk sentimentality, his special subject: sometimes the results of that long study turn sublime. Elsewhere, though, Blumenthal fails to find words as exuberant or as satisfying as he wants to remind us that life can be: some readers will thrill, but others will likely balk, at "the lustful little angel that inhabits his body," "the deliquescence of the air whispering its soothing song." (May)

Michael Blumenthal graduated from Cornell Law School with a J.D. degree in 1974 after studying philosophy and economics at the State U. of New York at Binghamton. Formerly the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of the poetry collection Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has just been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from German, French and Hungarian, he practices psychotherapy with Anglophone expatriates in Budapest and spends summers at his house in a small village near the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary. Blumenthal currently holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He will occupy the Copenhaver Chair at The University of West Virginia Law School for the spring semester 2009.