Michael Hofmann, 19 March 2020
“... If it answers to now, if it’s sufficiently fearless and adaptable and capacious, why not write the same poem again and again – in couplets, in slabs, in measured stanzas, in irregular numbered parts, in plump quatrains? Why not saturate the thing with fact, with horror, with beauty, with violence, with throwaway colloquial titles, with smeary cut-up technique? With the poem mirroring a fast walk (in New York City) or a slow drive (in Detroit); a short lyric documentary film with snatches of Motown and inner voiceover; a dustbin full of bundled-up news we’d rather forget, or something even more abstract and uncontrollable (a facility, a medium, a pulse); and the poet a vagrant, a collector, a compulsive notetaker, a Cassandra, a Louis MacNeice for the 21st century?This, I believe, is the case with Lawrence Joseph, whose A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems, is out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 ...”