Lucien Zell Tiny Kites

Annotation

Any poet worth his salt transcends categories. But for me California-born Lucien Zell is very much a Romantic poet. In an age when the run of poets have their noses stuck to the grindstone of their own mundane affairs Zell takes a bold broad expansive view of life and our place in the world. It’s a view, a shifting, restless view full of wonder and the constant sense of surprise at the authorless miracle of existence. We lose the sense of wonder, of awe, for some, the sense of gratitude, at our peril. In his first American-published collection Zell brings us a taste of “the surge of peace that comes with wonder.” A Romantic, but Zell is certainly no confectionary-peddling dreamer. There’s wryness in these poems, an earned awareness of the various darknesses at our elbow. “The lonely trade beds and dream of one another” is one of the neat sardonic summations of the human condition studded throughout the book. “I wander through the dark wilderness by the light of my burning map” is another aphoristic gem reminding us that the mirror-image of gain is loss. Loneliness, loss, fear, doubt, there’s no shying away, or glossing of the pains of life, but, delivered with a certain trenchancy, a cool, chilled lyricism often redolent of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Zell’s tautly constructed poems are high-flying invitations to subsume our woes, if only for a moment, in a higher, grander, more embracing view of this, our one brief life. —John McKeown, 2018