Loving in Truth - (Sea Cliff Fund) by Jay Rogoff (Paperback)

About the Book

"Drawing on forty years of published work, Jay Rogoff's "Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems" marks a milestone in the career of this confident, wise, and rigorous poet. The volume presents over one hundred poems from earlier collections alongside forty-four poems previously unavailable in book form. Throughout his body of work, Rogoff skillfully interweaves craft and feeling as he contemplates immigrant ancestors, foreign adventures, baseball, ballet, and the uncanny entwinings of art and life. The new poems form three sharply etched sequences. In turn, Rogoff presents a series of short, wry poems in tribute to his wife and muse; reimagines Genesis's story of the creation and fall in a progression of strange ballads inspired by Lorenzo Maitani's reliefs on the faðcade of Orvieto Cathedral; and expands upon a theme that has always suffused his art, the interconnectedness of love and death. Both a valuable compendium of his finest work and a powerful introduction to his range of gifts, "Loving in Truth" offers a thorough immersion in the poetry of Jay Rogoff"--

Book Synopsis

Drawing on forty years of published work, Jay Rogoff's Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems marks a milestone in the career of this confident, wise, and rigorous poet. The volume presents over one hundred poems from earlier collections alongside forty--seven poems previously unavailable in book form. Throughout his body of work, Rogoff skillfully interweaves craft and feeling as he contemplates immigrant ancestors, foreign adventures, baseball, ballet, and the uncanny entwinings of art and life.

The new poems form three sharply etched sequences. In turn, Rogoff presents a series of short, wry poems in tribute to his wife and muse; re-imagines Genesis's story of the creation and fall in a progression of enigmatic ballads inspired by Lorenzo Maitani's reliefs on the façade of Orvieto Cathedral; and expands upon a theme that has always suffused his art, the interconnectedness of love and death.

Both a valuable compendium of his finest work and a powerful introduction to his range of gifts, Loving in Truth offers a thorough immersion in the poetry of Jay Rogoff.

Review Quotes

'Angels are impossible, ' writes Jay Rogoff in his powerful new book, Loving in Truth, and indeed no other poet writing today explores more deeply and convincingly the problematic nature of the ideal, how our hungers long both to affirm and transcend the given with the made. 'Nature bores me, ' he boldly claims, voicing thus the aestheticist inheritance of the amorous eye. For this too is nature, his, and yet just one extreme in a dialectical sensibility, at once symbolist and realist, incantatory and clear-eyed, enthralled and yet, by reverie and suffering alike, wise. For the 'dazzle of the world, ' by eyes invented and revealed, is 'at once redeeming and reducing.' We would be hard-pressed to find a poetics more animated by the paradoxes of love: more adept at giving flesh to metaphysics and weightless longing; more pinned, by sharp and radiant detail, to a retreating past. A stunning book.--Bruce Bond, author of Words Written Against the Walls of the City

Jay Rogoff's poems are a joy. Loving in Truth, reminds us, with its allusion to Sidney, that these verses are meant to give pleasure, both to the beloved (a frequent subject here) and to us. New poems--on Adam and Eve, on love in middle age--stand beside selections from a distinguished career. Characteristically deft and affecting, his Hechtean sequence 'Danses Macabres' is particularly winning. A deft and bracing collection!--David Yezzi, author of Black Sea

About the Author

Jay Rogoff is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including The Art of Gravity and Venera. His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous journals, and he serves as dance critic for the Hopkins Review. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.