Abundant Life

In Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems, a luminous selection from a considerable oeuvre, Hank Lazer demonstrates his commitment to comprehensive variations within his meditative-poetic practice. His work embodies clarity in language, focused concentration, and a fascination with Being. His practice is steadfast, measured, and impressive in inventive explorations: from mouthy lyric to austere perception, from disciplined formal inventions to colorful spirals of page space treking, from meditative projects to improvised responses, from grateful wonder at being in time to wary, watchful elegy. Lazer's range is dynamic, while the constants are charged spiritual seeking in Judaisms and in Zen Buddhist practices, and formally in aphorism, observation, notes, and daily clarities. This articulate CHAX selection has the force of one life-scroll unrolling-a long serial work that offers the humane pleasures of lucidity and querying, making a book movingly, interestingly, poised between equilibrium and disequilibrium. - Rachel Blau DuPlessis Hank Lazer is a wise, brilliant poet. He is also an uncanny poet. There is a strange, beautiful shimmer to the way his ear works, the way his soul works, the way he enacts and embodies presence and meditation in constructs of words. In Abundant Life, Lazer enacts a "small dance of wind /from cedar to oak // mind & its own instants / this // is called thinking / sometimes... wild wildly disordered as it happens clouds moment twisted disappearing / chronology of a human life ample in complexity beyond any telling of it." Abundant Life is a great book, magical and wild, embodying an astonishing array of kinds of beauty. It is a permanent treasure for us all. - Joseph Lease