The Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow

In the everyday language of Hank Lazer's beautiful, timely, and continuously responsive The Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow, the ordinary, the mysterious, and the marvelous continually morph into each other. Which is nothing special: each moment, each particular, comes forth in these pages simply as itself, fully received and embodied in the intimacy of the poem's delicately modulated cadences and phrases. So "form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form," where "emptiness" isn't "nothing" but the presence of all in each, "oneness" continuously attuned to each grainy and sometimes recalcitrant particular. "Filling a silver bowl with snow, / hiding a heron in the moonlight - / Taken as similar they're not the same; / when you mix them, you know where they are." In these poems "the storehouse of treasures opens of itself": the meadows and creatures of Duncan Farm; the beloved, numinous dead; the continuous miracle of a moment's coming and going; and the thoughts and words that register and respond to all that, also knowing themselves to be part of that ceaseless flow. If Zen sheds helpful light on what Lazer is up to in this wondrous book, these poems amply return the favor, shining their own particular, contemporary light back on the tradition, making it new.     

-Tenney Nathanson