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