Beautiful Rush

"Ears open, I wanted so much to listen." If, as Heschel said, the prophet is one whoemploys notes one octave too high, then Vincenz has transcribed what he has heard—including "ancient bone music, / skin songs / and marrowed incantations"—so that we can listen in. Vincenz is attuned to what most of us miss in "the song of the world." He listens until he hears "something / like knowledge, clearing its throat" and beyond that, in "a vast underground of pure silence," also "a language called stillness" beneath our human babble.

Cassandra's prophesies were doomed not to be believed and even the "river-wind draws a long sigh of disbelief," but Vincenz' readers are fortunate: his is a poetry of elegant hermeneutics, an ontological exploration as Vincenz is "on the search for stories of creation." He poses questions that expose inherited myth ("Why on earth / does life begin / with a single bright fruit?") and test our perceptions ("To watch a flower bloom / or a cloud fatten may be near impossible but how do you distinguish movement away or toward from the growth of billowing form?"). Yet the book is never ponderous, often humorous, eschewing what "sounds more or less like New Age claptrap." This is poetry that matters through its very quest for meaning: "Isn't there a potential for chaos in everything we see and touch? Where's the meaning in that?"

This tightly structured and imaginatively expansive work is akin to an Escher staircase, where laws of gravity are suspended so that we ascend and descend, holding the handrail of impeccable lines, stopping to stand in stanzas of timelessness, some of which lead "out of that honeycomb of life and enter that other world where there are no numbers to contain all of this." Vincenz reveals kairos within chronos and the "swathes of time steeped in eternity's teapot." Highly olfactory, from the realistic—"sweat, / perfume, fungal spores"—to the fantastic—"the fragrance of significant things / that appear to exist only in the mind, no more"—Vincenz follows his nose to the primordial source and we gladly follow him, even as we are impatient for more gnosis ("I know, I know, you want clarity, an illuminated mind, / not those fleeting visions of a future not yet born.") If death is the mother of beauty, then Vincenz fathers beauty further. WithBeautiful Rush, he has achieved what "seems like immortality." This book is a must-read that must be read to be believed. If "to be outside of convention is the ticket,"Beautiful Rush is a unique creation, a daring and gorgeously realized work, wherein "words are tuning forks ringing inside / glass minds." At times oracular, always spectacular, the beautiful words in Beautiful Rush will long resonate inside readers' minds.

"What is it really to be honest?" And why would we really be honest? To root in a particular geography of self at the same time as proposing more macro geographies in which the particulars of others can roost? For the sake of time seeking real time by way of sensory stories, by "words as tuning forks," by briny rhymes?

Are some people's poems sacred scars? Marks of the page as quirks in a day, as scratches into the body for meaning? Etches in a headboard. Drag marks from outstretched finger along a foggy window ("where I am not yet dead/where I am not quite born"). Curls made in hair ("your hair still cascades in both of our eyes"). Cracks made in the counter from slamming down a dish. Sneaker streaks pushed into the mud.

Who watches as our days pass us by? "Bioluminescent ghost[s]?" Who notices when we get caught in the crannies of the quotidian? And who etches into their own forms for retention, in acknowledgement of us, when those catches of many types present as beauty?

Vincenz' Beautiful Rush is a belaboring of the details of daily life in an effort at synthesizing them for beauty, from cliché. It is hard to live. It is hard to write living. Why then are we pulled to write it? What are we hoping to contact? What is worth this effort?

Vincenz' "intentional concern is to get a hearing," to hit the "mother lode:" a place where the wealth of somatic resonances can exist, can thrive even while cancelling certain things out. Where "hot fingers move fast," the "Buddha's barbed tongue" is eating out "the I in her." By "damaged magic" "the snake sheds its skin as the moon sheds its shadow." Led by sweat and perfume, by the foulness of the city "where artists seek the ears," we encounter the slow motility of days as they attends to figures, are attended to and brought near by certain attentions.

Reincarnation, melancholy, meals, small deaths, "eloquent prayers," "silent grave digging," this book rings with the most human of poems. I define a human poem, as a poem that "hear[s] voices in hard labor," that can admit its kinship to various shortcomings, needs for anesthetic. Human poems are poems capable of working with their imagined others wherein something/ entirely inhuman, entirely unheard of," can be met, reckoned with. For what is it to be human, beyond the seeking out of home? Beyond "a language called stillness, a child called language?"