Reconnaissance

Mark Pawlak is the author of eight previous collections of poems and the editor of six anthologies. His latest books, from which selections appear here, are Natural Histories (Červená Barva Press, 2015) and Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010 (Plein Air Editions/Bootstrap Press, 2012). His work has been translated into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann's Review, and Solstice, among many others. He is retired from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he supported his poetry habit by teaching mathematics. He lives in Cambridge.   "You may learn a lot about botany when you read Mark Pawlak's Reconnaissance, his newest volume of verse. 'No way!' you say. Continue, dear reader. Pawlak's book is actually four books in one: 'In Transit' (poems about traveling on Boston's MBTA), 'Pine Pillow Book' (poems, impressions, and found poems in and around northern Maine), 'Natural Histories' (where there's botany), and 'Go to the Pine' (more poems largely about Maine, but with a slightly different slant).Pawlak's travels on the subway remind me of Dante's Purgatorio. It's not exactly hell; what he encounters there is not actually torment, but dislocation and confusion in the denizens of the underground (and barely overground). A West Indies man hunches over a bible and preaches 'to all of us sinners and to no one in particular.' A white bearded mannequin' hold up a cardboard sign that reads 'H-E-L-P.' There is something notable about everyone he meets, like the Korean street musician who sings John Denver's 'Take Me Home, Country Roads,' 'her tongue wrestling to enunciate the 'l's, the 'r's.' Or his overhearing two teens talking about why they have to learn about something as small as electrons. These poems are so vivid, have so much felt life to them, that you can't help thinking, these people aren't imaginary...." - Walter Tulip "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