A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems

About this book

A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer Drawing from his first book Shouting at No One from 1983 and continuing through to his most recent So Where Are We? from 2017 A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Josephs "poetry of great dignity grace and unrelenting persuasiveness (John Ashbery) each poem an inspired made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth (Yusef Komunyakaa). Josephs poems constitute one of the most essential and visionary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. No other American poet covers the territory Joseph does. His ever-new interactions of thoughts voices and languagesinfluenced by his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic heritage his professional life as a lawyer and legal scholar and the economies of the world of working-class labor from which he comesbear witness on multilayered spatial and temporal planes to the velocities of global and historical change and to power structures embodied in endless wars unleashed capital racism and ecological destruction presenting an ongoing chronicle of what it means to write poetry in the turbulent times in which we live. But also integral to Josephs poetry is a sensual intimacy passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty love and justice are indistinguishable. Meticulously formed emotionally fierce intellectually challenging Josephs poems press back against the high-stakes pressures of our time with a moral and aesthetic intensity not easily forgotten.