spuytenduyvil

Paradise is the track we're following in this poem, the spoor we're on, the prey we're tracking. . . .Reworking a poetic midrash in the light of Jabès, availing himself of a deceptively simple poetic line which has antecedents in Michael Palmer's recent work, and then referring to scriptural hermeneutics throughout, Finkelstein has created an amazing new kind of poem: as tensile as it is frangible, as spiritually reviving as it is philosophically zeroing.

     Peter O’Leary, Cultural Society

 

Duncan, late in his life, arrived in a similar neighborhood when he began to leave the poems of "Passages" unnumbered. They would no longer be a sequence -from Latin sequor, "follow" - but a cluster, a constellation of poems that could be entered at any point, read in any order. The "order" of "Passages," then, is something like that described in a sentence of Emerson's Finkelstein paraphrases: "The center is everywhere / and the circumference nowhere"

      Jacket Magazine

 

The act of reading, after all, always leaves "some other's / dreams" at least partially "enfolded in the self." Finkelstein's gift, in Track, lies in his ability to stay half self-conscious and half spellbound by those others' dreams.

     Sajl Magazine

 

Finkelstein’s Track undertakes a voyage beset by recombinatory duress. An excursus through realms where “the letters / arrive to be destroyed,” this wickedly wise poem keeps on arriving long after it's done-a lingering track or trade of mind in mind, trouble in mind. It is a beautiful, beguiling book of unrest.

     Nathaniel Mackey

 

Track beautifully reminds us that pain and uncertainty are “to be exchanged for music.” This is a haunting “broken crown” of a poem in which language’s power to name transmutes loss simultaneously into celebration and epiphany.

     Michael Heller

 

For a long time now, Norman Finkelstein has exercised the most deep intelligence and music in our poetry, on behalf of Poetry.  In Track, his gifts travel to zenith. The cumulative sense and soul of so many passages ventured, so many thresholds crossed, shed a perfect radiance. In Track, the light is solid.

      Donald Revell