Invisible Cities

INVISIBLE CITIES by David Shattuck attempts to chart the paths back into memory where connections are forged and lost in the backdrop of abandoned cities, past lives, and what Loren Eiseley called the "wild, impassible places" found in nature. The Invisible City is the one we build in our minds with memories and parts dreamed up to fill in the gaps where memory fails. It's where we first lived alone, first faced death, found love and lost it, and grew immeasurably into ourselves. "David Shattuck's INVISIBLE CITIES is a beautiful collection of poems, brimming with heartache and solace, lyricism and longing, wrenching desolations and the true comforts of the physical life. Drunk and drowsy by the shore, he writes, 'I am ready for anything: / like a fawn still wet / from his mother, stumbling / for the first time, / stunned at the insistence of air.' Here is a poet in the world's-grace-seeking vein of Jim Harrison, Richard Hugo, and Theodore Roethke. I have been waiting for a collection such as this from someone of Shattuck's generation for a long time."-Jonathan Johnson "'How wide the world had seemed, / how easy the surrender into it,' David Shattuck writes in INVISIBLE CITIES. This surrender yields a book of departures but also returns, and unreels haunting portraits of people displaced between places both new and familiar to them-the cities they regret, the wild mountains and islands of pine, the rivers full of stubborn fish and drowned souls. But out of this restlessness, Shattuck forges moments of consolation, too, transmuting regret, turning exile into a kind of boon. 'And because I have nowhere / to go and no one expects me,' he writes, 'I am the earth's / most fortunate son.' We, too, are fortunate to receive this striking and confident debut."-Corey Marks "David Shattuck's remarkable collection contrasts the richness of the inner life with the isolate journeys of consciousness through a coldly objective world that spares no one its vivid perplexities. In a language often reminiscent of the late James Wright, Shattuck's poems confront primary mortal facts: we don't know who we are, neither blessing nor suffering will stay, our separateness (fully admitted and lived) offers us our most profound experience of community. This is an important, first rate first book."-Christopher Howell