Human Rights

I love Joseph Lease's writing -- and Human Rights is Lease at his best. It is that very rare thing, a fully realized poetic BOOK: while there are many superbly done individual poems, Human Rights also displays a novelist's sense of pacing and overall effect. Find here evocations of historical legacy and spiritual mystery, but mostly enjoy it for the beauty of the language itself, which moves from lyricism to offhand remark and back again, all the while making good on what Robert Creeley once said of Joseph (I was in the audience and can vouch): "Somewhere out there must be a new poetry, and Joseph Lease may be its most aupicious practitioner." Or something like that.

Human Rights imagines what it sounds like to take words seriously, to believe in words as actions, as things we *do* to each other. Some poems describe what life is like when played by ear, while in others, the names of people and of things seem to take on the gravity of a word's entire life-history. In reading this book, one can hear the academy and the speech of a versed academic, but also the singing of a child. The result is a voice at once skeptical, baffled, trusting, risky, and wise. If the reader is willing to trust her ears as much as the poet trusts his own, nowhere is this book inaccessible. Even when the writer is wrestling with our recent, inhumane history, the deep shocks and stammers of it are incapable of breaking the spell of his lyric. Joseph Lease displays a faith in utterance as valuable as it is rare. His work is certainly worth looking into.

How many books of new poetry published in a given year will be remembered by the next generation of poets? Vanishingly few, naturally enough. But I will venture to say that Human Rights by Joseph Lease will be remembered by the next generation, and by the one after that. The reason is that Lease's poems have a reason for being: there is something at stake here, something that poses and exposes the situation of the soul. Lease as impassioned performer plays the entire tone-row of language, from erotic to political to philosophical to funny to angry to sublime. He plays language to the pitch at which beauty intermingles with terror. He inhabits voices from the past (especially in the poems that begin and end the volume) and turns the relation between form and content inside out. In so doing, Lease proves that experimentation in poetry can lead to emotional epiphany as well as to conceptual astonishment. His work refers and relates to that of the New York School poets John Ashbery and David Shapiro, but also to that of Baudelaire and the surrealists, and the Holocaust-haunted Romanian-German poet Paul Celan. Yet Lease's work is in no way derivative of these influences; like all original poets, Lease synthesizes, from the sum of his sources and experiences, a sound that is completely new. Get hold of this book at any cost!

Contemporary American poetry can welcome a new major voice with the publication of HUMAN RIGHTS. Lease's utilization of a mode of imagism, tinged by cogent political reflection in such long poetic sequences as "Apartment" and "Slivovitz," attains the precision, urgency, freshness, and rhetorical economy of William Carlos Williams at his best. Lease's superbly crafted free verse, building on that of Robert Creeley and others, offers powerful clarities, elegant narrative juxtapositions, and careful progress of articulation. He deserves to be regarded as one of our strongest contemporary political/experimental poets.

Smart, funny, musical, masterfully crafted: this is exactly the kind of work that real readers long for. Finally, a book of poems that doesn't feel like it just plopped out of the workshop mill, that doesn't rigidly adhere to one or another literary "school," that doesn't gaze relentlessly at the author's navel, that doesn't play to its audience's dumbest impulses, that explores politics and history and spirituality and erotic life as well as other human "rites," that makes readers so deeply deeply *glad* to be readers of poetry. Rich and expansive, this is a book to explore over and over and over again.