Overview

"In his triumphant new poetry collection, Away Away, Mark Pawlak casts his precise and contemplative eye over the countryside of the American Northeast. A prolific and widely anthologized poet, Pawlak shifts in these poems from playful and witty to somber and sparse, all with an unerring attention to the details of natural beauty and the hum of everyday life. Across myriad landscapes and literary forms, Pawlak draws on the minimalist discipline and philosophies of classical Japanese poetry, and transforms modes of everyday writing, from government lockdown notices to checklists. In the Japanese tradition, he writes: ""Outside, rainwater / rills down panes; / inside: / window sill, / housefly / dressed in spider-silk."" On flowers, in a poem inspired by botanical field guides, his language turns playful: ""Yarrow be true to yourself; / don't put on airs like Queen Ann's Lace."" Never forcing its hand, each poem guides you to slow down and take in each detail. This insightful collection, rich with allusion, brings us to a deeper understanding of our place in the world and our relationship to nature. Pawlak quotes Brassi: ""If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary."" In Away Away, Pawlak never falls into the trap of the ordinary, moving us instead continuously towards wonder."

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"""I can easily trace a direct lineage - from the songs of the Bard of Democracy; through someone like Frank O'Hara and his peripatetic I do this, I do that lyrics; to Mark Pawlak. Not only have they all, at one time or another, been entranced by the blab of the pavement on some of those same New York City streets, they maintain a faith that within the clear-eyed, matter-of-fact moments of our days, something essential is revealed. Beauty is what rings true within the quiet mind.""-Steven Ratiner, author of Giving Their Word ""'Down-at-the-heels Schenectady at dusk, the moon, nearly full, hanging over the main drag, painting the city in Hopperesque light, ' writes Mark Pawlak in Away Away. Overcoming separateness from the universe, the thirteen phases of the moon, the pandemic, and the unique American landscapes of upstate New York and the seacoast of Maine, Pawlak grafts vivid, evocative images to Whitman-length lines, bringing us closer to history and to ourselves. Whether he intersperses police logs with phenomenological ponderings on nature or explorations of human social classes, bays at iterations of the moon, or contemplates Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, his poems help us apprehend the unknowable.""-Margo Taft Stever, author of The End of Horses ""Mark Pawlak knows the names of places, plants and animals. He listens to the words his country-people say or sing around him. He reads words scratched into the walls of toilets or written by the great poets over the centuries. He doesn't forget the politics that shape one part of his life or the Covid lockdown that shapes another. In Away Away Mark Pawlak is a witness to the world passing by his window. What he sees there teaches its own specific wisdom, and it is also beautiful.""-Keith Taylor, author of All the Time You Want"

Author Information

Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals, and the editor of six anthologies. His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems and prose have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals, and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann's Review, and The World, among many others. His latest publication is the book-length memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021). Pawlak lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is co-editor of Hanging Loose, one of the country's longest lived and most influential literary presses.

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