Monday, June 11, 2018

"new" review of Reconnaissance

I only now happened across this review of my latest poetry collection "Reconnaissance" two years after the fact. Many thanks to Joyce Peseroff for the perceptive review:

http://www.joycepeseroff.com/when-i-say-boston-you-say-now/

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Review of Go to the Pine

There is no higher praise than when a native Mainer tells you you got it right. See George Smith's review of my Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016




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