Circle Routes

Circle Routes contains a recurring joyfulness that invites us into those brightest of spaces: memory and meditation. The poet's feelings are sometimes sharp with deliberate and thoughtful sarcasm; they can also soar with lyrical sweetness. John Minczeski has a penchant for winged things---not only planes but mayflies, bats, as well as the engagements of the human heart. Even the simple niris that starts life / as boxing gloves and ends with the smell / of bridesmaids becomes, in his attentive poem, an object of weightlessness and wonder. Minczeski takes on many concerns: the personal past, history and its unsettlements, natural history, some poets that read like travel pieces though certainly they are about inner space as much as outer space. Circle Routes is a fine, sweet-spirited, ambitious, beautifully accomplished book.