John High
HERE: A Poem For Billy High, 1959-2004
with photographs by Norman Fischer
Talisman House, Publishers
ISBN 10: 1-58498-053-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-58498-053-7
Paper, 150 pp., $15.95
In this book-length elegy rendered in the sparest strokes, the silence of the dead meets a Zen stillness centered in the author’s own practice. John High handles his subject with the most delicate distance—we never fully see the brother he mourns, but we sense him always, getting larger and larger, as only the dead can do, until he has become indistinguishable from the world he left. In this lovely book, High turns elegy to discovery while retaining the truth of sadness, and matches brevity with a generosity that not only grasps, but also loves, the human condition. —Cole Swensen
This book — and it really is a Book — walks the paradoxical intersection — back and forth — between substance and spirit — with restless, spare steps. Fleeting images of the monastic life — as an assurance and a dream — can’t quite dissolve the secular disappointments and losses behind each sentence. This way the book becomes for the reader what it is for the writer: a searing study of Here as an enfolded Everywhere. —Fanny Howe
Take away one letter and “snow” becomes “now, here.” Reading this poem, a shimmering, loving greeting for Billy High and for all of us, we become aware of the “leaves and ghosts of leaves,” crows, jays, tulips, lilacs and rain. Writing the natural world begins and ends with a “vanishing out here among us.” And time, the “empty boat,” implies the emptiness that is form. John High’s lucid and compassionate text is threaded through with photographs taken by poet and Zen priest Norman Fischer. —Norma Cole
In Here John High has created a cinema of the page Tarkofsky himself might treasure. This book-length elegy for a brother is also a gathering of icons for the end of the world, a world of nostalgia and sacrifice and unremitting vision, the “normal grandeur of abandon,” the poet might let slip, as his extraordinary scenes float before us. Blood, snow, branches, a one-eyed boy, questions for an empty sky, all flare in this film, this pilgrimage to a place, here, that seems, after all, as death sometimes does, to be traveling as well towards us. It would be too cruel to say this book is one John High was born to write. Let’s just say: how lucky the dead man was, to have been so loved. —Joseph Donahue
John High ranks among the most accomplished and respected poets, translators, and editors of his generation. Founding editor of Five Fingers Review and author of The Lives of Thomas, The Sasha Poems, and The Desire Notebooks, among others, he is one of his generation's foremost translators of contemporary Russian poetry. The principal editor of Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, he is known for his translations of Nina Iskrenko, Ivan Zhdanov, and Alexei Parschikov, among others. A former Fulbright professor at Moscow State University, he currently teaches at Long Island University.
POETRY