Reconnaissance:
New and Selected Poems and
Poetic Journals 2005–2015
Poetry, paper 136 pages
ISBN: 978-1-934909-83-6
My ninth poetry
collection is now available from Hanging Loose Press (http://hangingloosepress.com/newtitles.html)
Reconnaissance
brings together a decade’s worth of Mark Pawlak’s work exploring the nexus of
Japanese poetic journals and American observational poetics. These new and
selected poems owe allegiance to the early experimental books of William Carlos
Williams (e.g. Spring and All) as much as to the Pillow Book of
Sei Shōnagan and to Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. They join
aspects of poetry with the daily, or near daily, “takes” of journal writing,
but differ from traditional diaries or
journals by emphasizing the act of writing itself in collaboration with the
day's account.
Praise
for Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals
“Pawlak’s work succeeds in eliminating an undiscriminating “I”
for an observant and non-occlusive “eye” that sees objectively and in seeing
presents the image, the visual and sensory experience, as the focus of the
poetic impulse. In Pawlak’s work the poet gains, by removing himself, a
remarkable understanding of the natural world and his—and thus our—presence in
it, thereby achieving a consistency of vision and linguistic vigor I can only
marvel at and applaud. Pawlak is among the very best poets working today."—Pablo Medina
“[Pawlak’s]
writing has been incisive and perspicuous from the start; during the past
fifteen years . . . his work—quietly but firmly experimental—has developed in
original ways that fuse the traditional concerns of American poetry with those
of daily recording. . . . I don’t know any poets whose work has the same
flavor, including complexity, as Pawlak’s.” —Charles North
