Pantheon and Other Poems
by
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FOR HAN SHAN AND THE OTHERS Even in your day it was a literary trope: To resign high office and slip away to the high mountains, wandering icy streams until the very deer would eat from your harmless hands, the only sound the woodcutter’s invisible axe. Mountains eternally present now as splotches of ink on silk where we see you, sometimes, a tiny figure in the immensities of mist and gorge imperturbably lost in a waterfall’s moving stillness. We do not aspire to it, really, caught, as you probably were, in the swirl of the dust of this world, the hot dust of desire and duty, the passions whose weighty chains we love. But as we read you there grows the sad nostalgia for the one who might have been who walks the peaks and drinks the clear, cold streams.
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About the Book
Drawing on myth, literature, and the Bible, Arnold Asrelsky’s poems create surprising and illuminating connections between quotidian events and larger themes. In the stealing of a comforter, he sees the rupture of the social contract. In a father’s pontificating at the dinner table, he hears the voice of the enthroned Zeus. In the works of a still life painter, he sees a secular way of celebrating the created world.
His poems range from the struggle for New York City’s taxis to the eventual heat-death of the universe. His often witty language underscores the comedy inherent in man’s longing for transcendence, but it is also suffused with sadness at the inevitable failure of such desires. Many of his poems reflect his love of Chinese poetry and his fascination with the thought of Zen and Daoism.
An important influence on the poet’s development was his early discovery of Manhattan as a playground. Its streets introduced him to the world’s culinary delights in Chinatown and Little Italy, among the Armenian restaurants of Murray Hill and the Greek restaurants of Times Square. The coffee shops of Greenwich Village were his debating halls where he and the other would-be intellectuals argued passionately and endlessly among the cups and croissants.
About the Author
Arnold Asrelsky is a professor of composition and literature at Queensborough Community College in New York. Born in Brooklyn, he lives in Manhattan. From his balcony on the Lower East Side, he delights in the busy traffic on the East River. This is his first volume of poetry.