Beginning with his first book, Shouting at No One, published in 1983, through to his most recent, So Where Are We?, published in 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph’s poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness (John Ashbery), each poem an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth (Yusef Komunyakaa). Joseph’s poems comprise one of the most essential and visionary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. No other American poet covers the poetic territory Joseph does, as he invents an imaginatively spacious language global in ambition, acutely attentive to power structures that are violent and create violence, bearing witness to the velocities of historical change embodied in endless wars, unleashed finance capital, racism, and ecological destruction. But his poetry also reflects a deep, sensual intimacy, driven by an awareness of a poetic order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable. Joseph has written an ongoing chronicle of what it means to write poetry in the turbulent times in which we live. His ever-new, always alive interactions of shifting thoughts, voices, and languages-impacted by his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic heritage, his professional life as a lawyer and legal scholar, and the economies of the world of working-class labor from which he comes-register the speed and multilayered dimensions of our common experience on various spatial, temporal, and social planes. Intellectually and emotionally fierce, laser-like and satiric, phenomenally aligning sight to sound and observation to feeling, meticulously formed, displaying a love of line, shape, and painterly color, Joseph’s poems press back against the high-stakes pressures of our time with a moral and aesthetic intensity not easily forgotten.
