The Impossible Toystore

Mark Perlberg's poems are deeply felt, their language concrete, alive, moving. Whether his verses are about his family, meditations on time and memory, love poems, or even ghost narratives, his concerns are broadly humane. His voice is sometimes lyric, sometimes narrative -- often in the same poem -- but always unmistakably his own.The largely autobiographical Part I, "In the Theater of Memory", opens the collection with moving poems about the poet's family -- his overeducated maternal grandfather, his mother, the dead father the boy never really knew. The tone darkens in Part II, "Nightswear", which includes a powerful recollection of Perlberg's own heart surgery and brief but wrenching Holocaust poems based on a trip to Prague: "An old Jew dreams ... the Grand Rabbi / has forgotten all the secret names of God" ("Kabbala").In Part III, "The Floating World", Perlberg offers love poems and continues his lifelong preoccupation with East Asia. Verses about childhood fill Part IV, "From the Deep Kitchen", with a memory of the spicy smell of burning, discarded Christmas trees; a touching tribute to the poet's first-grade teacher; and recollections of carefree summer days.Perlberg's approach is sometimes blunt, occasionally surreal, but invariably vivid and without a touch of sentimentality or cliche. With language both animated and immediate, The Impossible Toystore is a pure joy to read.