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The Thinking Man Who Dives Deep--
Poems About Love and Death
The poems in Between the Totems of Labor and Love deal with the most important subjects of all, love and death. Here love refers to the human community, the relationships between us all, the common journey that keeps us going in the face of the inevitable. The inevitable is, or course, death, and that’s where Wasserman’s poetry dives especially deep: the bold look into the face of aging and death, the acceptance that death is a part of life--and not just the last part, but the stuff of which life is made. In “Life, the Tiny Old Man, and the Woman,” for example, life appears to pass from one body into another, keeping the march of life and death going.
How heavy? But no, these poems are filled with humor and surprising light. And Burton Wasserman delights in the music of words. Life may be a death march, but it has a rocking, mocking cadence. The poems are full of rhymes, half-rhymes, internal rhymes, and rhythms that move playfully from classic metrical form to free verse.
Between the Totems of Labor and Love is informed by compassion for the human condition, but there are also moments of humorous and accurate observation of society, as in “Sin City Sonata,” and moments of touching tenderness, as in “Wildflowers,” in which the poet affirms his love for his wife and in so doing stems, for the moment, the progress of aging and death.
Burton D. Wasserman has been a comedy writer, a welfare worker, and a real estate manager. His poems have appeared in numerous national journals, such as California Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and Black River Review. His first book, Handmining the Cosmos, was published in 1991. He lives in New Rochelle, New York, with his wife, Norma. |
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Between the Totems of Labor and Love
Poems
Burton Wasserman
ISBN 1-56474-380-2
80 pages, paperback, $12.00
For ordering information, click here or phone (800) 662-8351
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