A Poet Playing Doctor
by Daniel KlawitterPublish: Sep 12, 2015PoetryBook Overview
Daniel Klawitter is a poet capable of great sweetness and formal grace, a poet who can imagine that “We are little dramas encased in flesh— // As we discover the heart of silence,” but do not be deceived. Klawitter is also a poet of sly humor, who imagines communists responding to Marx’s comments about modest loving that “In the midst of class struggle / there’s always time to snuggle.” But again—do not be deceived. At the root, Klawitter is a passionate poet who loves life deeply but also embraces his own complicated faith. This passion bursts through again and again, in cries of grief— “O god, my grief is a child / I hold as a thief / might hold his last night / of freedom…” and in sympathy for the sufferings of others, where “You might see every wound / in the world as your own.” He also directly faces that sympathy’s political realities, from suburban greed and anomie to misguided immigration policies to industrial accidents. A passionate and loving anti-fundamentalist, he can in one breath say “God, I hope the end / of the world is nigh / for these miniscule men / and their unconscious / self-hatreds,” and then in the next tell us, following William Sloane Coffin Jr., that “religion is a crutch, / but what makes you think / you don’t limp?” We are fortunate to have among us such a rich poet, who quarrels so meaningfully with himself, illuminating thereby our struggles as well as his own.—David J. Rothman, author of The Book of Catapults and Part of the Darkness
Klawitter’s take on religion is interesting, as a subject that often has people, and writers, on one “side” or the other. But you will also find in these pages a poem built on an experience at a Denver soul food café, a non-apology poem for liking sausage, a poem about his wife eating a pomegranate (“a bloody and laborious affair”), his grandmother in dementia, and a falling snowflake that becomes the occasion for an epiphany. Some are serious, while others verge with a punch on what might delightfully be called ‘heavy light verse.’
—Robert W. King, author of Old Man Laughing and Some of These Days
