Circle Routes: 2000 Akron Poetry Prize Winner, Chosen By Mary Oliver

In Circle Routes, a navigational term, John Minczeski transports the reader to a series of places that often interconnect, whether they are as close as the poet's back yard or as distant, in history and geography, as a Japanese concentration camp and the pungent streets of Rome. What links the poems, however diverse in subject and situation, is the poet's sense of empathy, his intimate understanding of anyone who has had to make a moral decision and live with the consequences. And yet these poems neither preach nor swell with self-satisfaction. Their treatment of even the darkest theme is lyrical, affirming that no evil can eclipse a world in which one can still hear the smallest hum of life, as at the end of "Great Circle Routes": "it's the sound of bees mired / in quadratic equations of lilies, / sucking light from the blossoms."