The Visible: Poems
''Reading this book of light, grief, fire, night, and the invisible life of the visible body, where the five senses are 'the five fingers of a hand / that grips the world,' we become fully human once again. 'Consider it a blessing,' says one poem, 'that part of you / you cannot see.' But Bruce Bond enables us to see; he is as fully and brilliantly a poet as anyone currently writing, and The Visible is not only a major achievement but, I suspect, a lasting one.'' --B.H. Fairchild''Bruce Bond is a lyric virtuoso of exceptional range who pilgrimages to the heart of experience, 'somewhere between the dead / and the living, the root and the wing.' As visceral as they are visionary, these poems of elegy and exploration compel us 'to take the fear / of burning and wear it as a name, to be / that angel in the fire.''' --Claire Bateman''In his remarkable new volume The Visible, Bruce Bond plumbs the 'long dark well of questions,' contemplating the mysteries of mortality and the vagaries of the human body---'the flesh, the earth, / the things that make us, molten at the core.' With characteristic formal precision and linguistic elegance, he reminds us of poetry's ultimate purpose, to show us the 'shining world outside the world.' Bruce Bond is one of our finest poets.'' --Claudia Emerson