Overview

In the everyday language of Hank Lazer's beautiful, timely, and continuously responsive The Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow, the ordinary, the mysterious, and the marvelous continually morph into each other. Which is nothing special: each moment, each particular, comes forth in these pages simply as itself, fully received and embodied in the intimacy of the poem's delicately modulated cadences and phrases. So ""form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form,"" where ""emptiness"" isn't ""nothing"" but the presence of all in each, ""oneness"" continuously attuned to each grainy and sometimes recalcitrant particular. ""Filling a silver bowl with snow, / hiding a heron in the moonlight - / Taken as similar they're not the same; / when you mix them, you know where they are."" In these poems ""the storehouse of treasures opens of itself"" the meadows and creatures of Duncan Farm; the beloved, numinous dead; the continuous miracle of a moment's coming and going; and the thoughts and words that register and respond to all that, also knowing themselves to be part of that ceaseless flow. If Zen sheds helpful light on what Lazer is up to in this wondrous book, these poems amply return the favor, shining their own particular, contemporary light back on the tradition, making it new. -Tenney Nathanson

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9781962847452

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Reviews

I am haunted by these seemingly slight poems. Hank Lazer's new book sounds a valedictory note but one absent of any melancholy. Instead, it radiates the calmness of ""otherside"" moments - fugitive, barely glimpsed, rich with the ephemeral. Deeply informed by his practice in Zen Buddhism, these poems attest to a state of being-here that, like a silver bowl filled with snow, holds fullness close; emptiness even closer. They gleam with an uncanny and sustaining clarity. -Patrick PritchettLike Wang Wei, Saigyo, and Su Dongpo before him, Hank Lazer's recent work - most saliently here in The Silver Bowl Is Filled With Snow - reflects the Zen spirit of quiet, sane, and compassionate reflection. A pleasure to read these poems in an insane world. -Norman FischerI finished The Silver Bowl in the early morning earlier this week, which felt like the perfect time to be reading and immersing in it. I found it remarkable that it touches on so many tragedies but it feels so energized, with a pulse on life, on a dharma that is personal but wide and open. -Pearl KanMany of the poems in The Silver Bowl are set in rural Alabama, at Hank Lazer's beloved Duncan Farm, in a landscape of rocks, meadows, cows, gum trees, and stars overhead. His generous voice encourages me/the reader to remember that we are all in this together. ""We are equal before the light."" -Susan MoonThe Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow is a lyrical meditation on the beauty found, if we look carefully, in living through each day. These poems are prayers, transforming, through the force of their particularized and often idiosyncratic language, the mundane into the extraordinary. Lazer continues to be a master of surprise, crafting lines as little linguistic gifts, and reminding us at every turn, ""there is more/we will never/know/even as we/can see it."" -Jacqueline Allen Trimble- Poet Laureate of Alabama.

Author Information

Hank Lazer has published thirty-six books of poetry, including his most recent, Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems (Chax Press), and As We Vanish from Public View (7 Points Press) and field recordings of mind in morning (with 15 music-poetry tracks with Holland Hopson on banjo - available on YouTube). Along with Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems, Lazer has published a companion volume of essays, poetics, and interviews: What Were You Thinking - Essays 2006-2024 (Lavender Ink). To find out more about Lazer's various books, learn about talks, readings, and workshops, and see photos of Duncan Farm, see Lazer's website: https: //www.hanklazer.com

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