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