Marc Kaminsky

A Cleft in the Rock Marc Kaminsky

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Marc Kaminsky's A CLEFT IN THE ROCK is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded--in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body--these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to 'live / with catastrophe in the world / of signs and wonders.' His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human.--D. Nurkse