Owasco

Owasco: A Passage of Lake Poems contains imagery of sublime meditation, “I am breathing / stars” and “I look up / as if I knew / . . .  the distance / from one star // to the next”. Images that vibrate the senses with “the dull thud / of hickory / acorn and beech nuts / pounding the shore” and with Lake Owasco “kneading and folding / this deep // light / on its water / into warm / loaves of waves.” These poems by Paul B. Roth resemble English ivy weaving themselves around the brainstem to transport the reader directly into the sights, sounds and scents of a spiritual communion with moonlit ripples, burning driftwood, dragonflies, and water striders that inhabit Lake Owasco, so that ultimately the lake itself becomes the new flesh warming the bones of both reader and poet.

—Alan Britt, Crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge Towson University

In Owasco: A Passage of Lake Poems, Paul B. Roth hears the name that an owl calls, and he is one who intuits how the distance from one star to the next erases this name.  This is not a poetry of ego and prizes.  This is not a poetry of empty pyrotechnics.  We’re talking about mortality, about stones thrown into deep water. It is a poetry about anticipated absence, and night brimming over in one’s cupped palms.  You may not have read him yet, but Roth has stopped in his tracks, and he’s waiting by Owasco’s shore for you, with sobering news.

—Anthony Seidman

A poet stands on the shore of Owasco Lake, measuring darkness and nonexistence against light and water. His own future absence is present in his mind, but so also are stars “whose light / has never / been so quenching / as right now.” This new book by Paul B. Roth spellbinds as it calmly, steadily, faces up to finitude. Roth pays moving tribute to a lake that he knows intimately, and while doing so, he addresses our deepest qualms about our place on this star-lit earth, within Being that is also star-lit in these pages. Words are very carefully weighed here, for it is poetry that Roth holds up to the night sky.

—John Taylor