The Impossible Toystore

Mark Perlberg's poetry reveals intensely personal experience that simultaneously evokes universal human emotions and conditions. His finely wrought language, graceful cadences and precise imagery make this third collection of Perlberg's poetry an enduring literary achievement.

These wonderful poems cover a range of both narrative and emotion. The narratives have the impact of the very best short fiction, but they surprise you: the power of the narrative is really being shaped all along by the concentrated and beautifully wrought language. While these are often poems of memory, they are more often about the "impossible" gap between what we wish the past was like and what we know it was. Still, the poems are not mostly exercises in memory; the best are great examples of language intensifying emotion and image. Some excellent poems on painters paintings, and the power of imagery. Deserves to be much read, reread, and quoted.

This is a collection of personal and very lovely poems that you will want to read and reread, for the intellectual and emotional content of the poems as well as the very considerable art of the poetry. Perlberg creates beautiful word pictures, but without the cold abstractness of much imagistic poetry, and he deals, with great subtlety and intelligence, with feelings and experiences that are both universal and substantial. The work is accessible and moving without ever being simple. The language is so musical and the rhythms so natural that many of the poems demand to be read aloud. I found the poems exploring the poet's memories of childhood events and family relationships to be particularly affecting, at once honest and unflinching but also sensitive and forgiving. I have gotten much pleasure out of this slim volume.

In his third collection of poetry Mark Perlberg continues to take us on a fabulous voyage from his pre-World War II childhood to the rewarding days of his maturity. With delicacy he unfolds the petals of feeling about his family and his travels through the byways of our country, beginning with the arrival in New York in in the 1880s of his grandfather Ivar, a Jew from Sweden, to his own summer rest on an island near Portland, Maine, in a letter to Huckleberry Finn, with whose peregrinations he has identified.

Mark Perlberg has written a beautiul and sensative collection of poems that indicates his deep feelings. The subects range from the Holocost and heart surgery to love and the floating world of Japan. It is a truly remarkable book, which I highly recommend.