Night & Day: A Collection of Poems
By P.J. Laska
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About this ebook
and with a hair-raising comic vitality. Given the complexity of his
occasionally dark, unabashedly political, philosophical and underground
writings, he [can be described] as an Appalachian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
--Jeff Biggers, Contributing Editor to The Bloomsbury Review
Eschewing conventional poetic fashion, Laskas engaging collection of over three decades of writings in the shadow of corporate domination is a sweeping poetic and prosaic, lyrical and anti-lyrical assemblage of thought-provoking epigrams, puns, and philosophical dialogues, together with voices and vignettes of a by-passed America. From the stripped-mined hills and hollows of Appalachia to the banal debris of urban streets, his work unfolds, with respectful understatement, the on-going global desecration of inner and outer life. With patient yet alarmed urgency he brings to the surface an ecological counter-tradition whose contours trace back as far as the ancient Chinese Dao De Jing.
-- Csaba Polony, Editor, Left Curve
NIGHT & DAY is an iconoclastic 35 year poetic chronicle of Americas OCD. With a smiling grimace the author journeys to the psychological interior of the Homeland, sees through the nations repetition compulsion and self-protective historical amnesia, and returns with Zen-like epigrams, satires, dialogues, and a set of healing philosophical Maxims of Access.
BOOK REVIEW:
The Past Finds Its Way Home, September 23, 2010
By Sacramento Book Review "Sacramento Book Review" (Sacramento, CA)
This review is from: Night & Day: A collection of poems (Paperback) by P. J. Laska
"O the fabulous histories/of fleeting things remain/each once and ever instant/ effervescent, like the faces/youll remember years hence/when the hills are mythic/fictions of the night sky--/a moon will rise in memory/over Morgantown,/ and youll be thinking/what if what if what if..." P.J. Laska `s collection of poems is a tour de force in the examination of a disappearing homeland, the governments gross and compulsive negligence, and the way back to a place of home through philosophical musings. Laska has portrayed a fertile landscape of a working-class citizenship; coal miners, janitors, salesmen across the rich diversities of the Appalachians. But it could be anywhere, anywhere there is history and the undying thirst to regain its story.
//Night & Day// is a revolutionary documentary shaped by Laskas skill and free-thinking awareness. He has crafted this collection into three very distinct and thought-provoking sections, each lending a vivid picture created on a palette of carefully blended "anti-lyrics." His style reaches from haiku to epigrammatic dialogue to philosophical conversations to a one-act play. The different forms make for a seamless flow and keeps the reader engaged in an almost voyeuristic indulgence. The images are seen, felt, and experienced, "Quick-dipping/their heads, they/roll silvery drops/down their backs/then shimmy/the dust/from their wings." His eye for the senses is clearly evident, a profound craftsmanship on each page.
The main theme points to loss and the restitution of a culture, a reinstatement of what has vanished, what has been taken, or rather, an intense look back at a sober lingering. The governments involvement is one of disdain, but what strikes me is the search for meaning through philosophical traditions, the hope for a return to nature, and what is whole from a place of drought. In many ways, these poems are odes and pieces of the subjects soul. This is a call, an invitation, to query. I accept.
P.J. Laska
P.J. LASKA has been a poet-dissident since the days of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Born and raised in the coal mining region of Appalachia, he lived in Japan as a guest of the U.S. Air Force before returning to complete a Ph.D. in philosophy. For several years he lived in West Virginia’s New River Gorge and edited The Unrealist, a left literary magazine. His first book of poems was a National Book Award finalist. He now lives near the Santa Rita Range in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona.
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