My Blossoming Everything

Philip Terman's new collection, My Blossoming Everything, embraces the multiplicity of the quotidian - what the philosopher/theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel calls "radical amazement." "Now all is quiet," the poet writes, "save for those sparrows and Neruda/who, too, is blossoming again, the way we all blossom,/even the dead stars, each and every particle of dust/says its testament." My Blossoming Everything evokes the largest poetic themes through the intimacy of personal memory and empathy. Ranging from personal narratives to pastoral lyrics to elegies to odes, braiding love and marriage, childhood and parenthood, friendship, the life of nature and the life of poetry, My Blossoming Everything is a testament to the moments of attention in which the world blossoms.