New Book from Michael Steffen ( Lily Books)

 https://lilypoetryreview.blog/i-saw-my-life-by-michael-steffen

The long eponymous poem making up the middle section of this collection narrates the very near, local journey of loss with its timeless bearing. It leads Steffen (and us through his sketchbook with its commentary) to the recognition of a daughter who’s gone away to college and come back home for the weekend. The narrative explores the layers of age and youth in a father confronted with the inventory of his life, in a crisis of the heart, a dispute with his landlord, all under the enchantment of tactile common day-to-day moments puzzled and informed by a revisited past.

Line by line there’s a real cumulative pulse in the life of the here again, lost again, George Kalogeris has said of the extended meditation. I love the haunting particulars, the day by day detail of attrition evoking the larger trauma.

Daniel Tobin has praised the poem for how it maintains the virtues of an episodic narrative with the vigorous musical qualities of genuine poetry. The late David Ferry noted, The meter, at the poem’s length, and with so many different tasks to perform, is really remarkable. The melody runs through it all and is a pleasure, in the likely conversations, the poem’s physical descriptions as well as its metaphysical propositions.

The reaches of far and near persist thematically into the book’s haunted third section where the poems fantail between subjects as intimately owned as a Sunday afternoon family meal and as distantly passed down as a story about the maternal grief of a great grandmother. The poet’s list reaches all the way back to the Battle of Hastings, in a memory of visiting the Tapestry of Bayeux recording the origins of the language on his tongue and its first canticles of springtime’s desire in the woods’ warblers, So pricketh hem nature in hir corages.

Documentary, audaciously imaginative, I Saw My Life brings us poems in a likely American idiom, with loft and charm to wave us off the untextured information highways our daily lives have come to frequent and speed along. Here we find a singular voice of variety appealing to our preference for a life of experience and choices, abiding to its story without any pitch at our convictions. It is a welcoming and welcome body of writing.

Michael Todd Steffen lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He co-curates The Hastings Room Reading Series, and publishes articles on new and established poets on The Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.