The Persistence of Memory

In The Persistence of Memory, Steven Deutsch recalls his childhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood on the skids. His poems feature his colorful Jewish family, particularly his older brother Barry, "thirteen and the source of all knowledge," and neighborhood characters like LeRoy and his gang, "so loose-limbed you imagined them melting in the August heat." In powerful poems that take place in the Viet Nam era, Deutsch describes the limbo and guilt of those who go to war and those who don't, the drug-hazed late '60s culture, and portraits of the shell-shocked veterans who come home. Later, Deutsch speaks of cancer and of a last visit before his brother's death, "our patter . . . so to script, we manage not to mention the hospice team, the feeding tube, and morphine drip." Like Ted Kooser, Deutsch uses the everyday of people and events to offer up our universal humanity. You will love his stories. Sarah Russell, author of I lost summer somewhere and Today and Other Seasons Steve Deutsch 's poems will haunt you. Each poem blends nostalgia with the present. The comic words of Great Uncle have you laughing as do Max, Stony, Aunt Sarah, and others in his memorable cast. Through his poems, we travel from Brooklyn to Vietnam and to college towns. Amazingly, the poet never leaves us there but guides us from memory and humor to the present. We see and feel him, "finding my way home in the dark." His precise memories lead to moments where he and the reader yearn to understand that which is not always understandable. Mary Shay McGuire, author of Always the Blue Tide Turning In his second collection, Steve Deutsch offers poems that grab you by the throat but hold you tenderly. A 13-year-old violinist plays his dead twin's cello in the cold after the funeral. The memory of JFK's funeral motorcade is forever bound to a schoolmate's suicide attempt and how "not one of us / ran to help him." And a man in yoga class imagines his long-dead father gleefully teaching the loud, grimacing "lion's breath" to kindergartners and Walmart shoppers. These elegiac, sometimes jubilant, often drolly humorous poems confront us with time's cruelty on certain friendships⸺"even the continents / are drifting apart-/ are becoming strangers." But they also buoy us with the hope, taking us "running wild-hearted /through the first green." Steve Deutsch is a nimble poet and a story-teller with heart. Mary Rohrer-Dann, author of Taking the Long Way Home