You Are Here

Acerbic, rueful, tender, and suffused with understated wit, Paul Breslin's first collection of poems inhabits a realm of hard truths: the human condition in extremis, imprisoned or enslaved; the urban nightmare of incipient violence; the universe of adult dementia seen from the perspective of the baffled child.

The themes of You Are Here intertwine with subtle connections. Cars blasting the neighborhood with their persistent noise are "like pulsars/drifting in from deep space"; the speaker's uneasy observation of his self-destructive father brings before us a sufferer collapsing violently inward upon himself, like the sun in a newly discovered astrophysical state that pulls "the matter around/it down and in". Even the more impersonal poems absorb some of their peculiar radiance from the restless gloom of the sequence about the father's disappearance.

You Are Here admits into its darkness moments of gentleness and surcease. As the book closes, low voices heard across the water become "bridges/stretching over the lake, connecting everyone" under a sky that covers fathers, children, and the suggestion of redeemed time.