Claims of Home

Poetry. "Here is a quarter century of work from a poet who has patiently teased out the sounds of sense from American speech—overheard on a father-and-son tour of prospective colleges or at a 'scrub-urban birthday barbecue.' To read David Katz's shapely, sonically savvy, poems is to enter with the poet into an ongoing dialogue between contemporary talk and our modern literary past (as Bishop, Crane, Borges, Rushdie, Moore, O'Hara, Stevens, Auden, and Lowell traverse the stage of his poetry in turn), as well as with ancient Jewish culture (as enunciated by Gabirol, Halevi, and the Bible). Katz's CLAIMS OF HOME bestrides the new world and the old, claiming finally an enduring home in the heart"—David Yezzi.