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December 17, 2024

Jane Huffman:

A late addition to the great tradition of wisdom texts, Robert van Vliet’s Vessels attends to what it means to be alive in the anthropocene, an era of climate destruction and dislocation from the natural world. ¶ “That is / the puzzle for / every generation,” he poses, “to / fix what has / been fixed.” The poet’s gentle, prophetic voice ekes out an intrepid authority, half-whispered into the ear as “water whispers to / the seed as it lies / on its belly,” and the poems function as both meditations and instructions for use. “Speak / carefully,” he instructs in one of the book’s many near-adages, “or the / listening fish will mistake / your confusion for their order.” ¶ Guided by gnostic and transcendentalist thought and built on found materials and chance operations, these poems walk a wooded path, where there is refuge, dissonance, ash, strange magic, and where below the observable world is the “unforeseen” territory of the spirit. —Jane Huffman


Vessels

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