Selected Poems, 1980-2013

Norman Fischer's new book is like a house with many mansions. Each mansion is explored room by room. The rooms are poems, and the poet seems to move unconscious of positive negativity, unobstructed liberty, paradoxes without stress. The syntax alters in these mansions of thought. They were not built by monks in the 13th century but by a priest in the Zen tradition, in the United States, during a millennial shift. The poems walk through language structures they have inherited and interpreted; you can identify their location by shifts in their twists of words and sentences. They are looking for a perfect way to say what they are looking at, but the world is like water without an image in it. In its calm appraisals, the poems begin to find figures of substance and resting places worth looking for, living for.--Fanny Howe, author of Love and I: Poems & Night Phlilosophy