PETRARCH by Tim Atkins

“Who is this Petrarch? Who is this Tim Atkins? He is an English poet profoundly affected by the American ear of the 1970s to present. These are meant to be translations, but they are more akin to transformations of everything Atkins has ever read or done, including what he saw at breakfast. In that way, they are Buddhist reckonings with the daily, not unlike Joanne Kyger's or Philip Whalen's recordings of microfluctuations in perception. The ostensible prime mover of Petrarch's poems is love, though the beloved body (like the world) is a bit whacked. I.e., he's taking the broken pieces then reconnecting at new joints. Not sure he's got the elbow at the right socket (seems to be protruding from the hip). He does have the poem in a kung-fu grip, no dog can wrest it from him. And that's because he knows it's all we have.” — Eleni Sikelianos

“When he writes, 'all your beauty took me down on earth,' he means you, Laura, as well as your pet cat, trombones, detective novels, a silver spaceship, Marx in Essex, and the matsumushi beetle: there’s nothing Tim Atkins can’t love. What kind of knowledge is this? Perhaps one that touches the world as an equal in the dark, doesn’t tell it what it is, doesn’t hurry daylight. If that means these poems sometimes allow us to breathe, it’s not that they provide redemption. Through their musical gasping, squeezing all the love in it, their gentle and self-deprecating hesitancy becomes absolute sadness and happiness. As well as ill-defined and mediocre sadness and happiness. Here is the poem as the friend.” — Amy De’Ath