Errings (Poets Out Loud (Fup))
"A hard won, fully realized, wonderfully eccentric book.  Rather than the anxiety of influence, Peter Streckfus vows for a complex, loving embrace of influence. Written at the intersection of the words of father and son, through the echoing world of the father's unpublished novel, Errings is an adventure--full of transport--in dream and in time. This is lovingly tender and smart work."--Hank Lazer"In his two collections, Peter Streckfus has made a lyric poetry of the highest order: spacious, luminous, contemplative, filled with strange voyages and miniature epics--he is a seer, a visionary, and yet how effortless this work seems; at its center, a stillness as ardent and searching as anything within memory."--American Academy of Arts and Letters citation for the Rome Prize in Literature"Peter Streckfus's great subject is the discovery, repeated second by second, that we exist. The subject is older than Plato, but precedent, though passionately embraced, does not prepare us for the shock of being. 'I held myself, first born,' says Streckfus. Then: 'I heard a voice in my ear.' Then: 'I felt my language torn from my mouth, writhing on the deck like an eel out of water.' To exist in Errings is to experience one's own language as an alien tongue while finding oneself miraculously capable of understanding it. To read the poems is to experience a similar ecstasy, for their language feels simultaneously erotic and chaste, ancient and avant-garde. Streckfus makes the act of reading feel as thrilling, syllable by syllable, as the fact of being alive--'you my young thing, you shaped like a mouse, like an ear.' No other poet of his generation coaxes from such a sternly disciplined instrument such ravishingly lyrical music."--James Longenbach"If you read and admired (as I did) Peter Streckfus's Yale-Younger The Cuckoo published a decade back, then it's a no brainer to cozy up to these new acts of collusion while spreading yourself out on green heather."--Coldfront Magazine