THE LONG JOURNEY OUT

Lieber uses details both small and infinite to explore the mind in this poetry collection.

A poet is a witness; everything the eye can see and the mind can remember can be put to paper and preserved. In this collection, the poet and his speakers embody this idea, gathering details from their day-to-day lives to home in on, from a hike with a young daughter to a talk with an old lover to a consideration of how to make the most of a nice afternoon in Manhattan. The collection is divided into four sections, but the text resembles the form of a novel. There’s a one-poem prologue, and a body that contains most of the verses; a couple of poems act as an epilogue, followed by an afterword. Lieber plays with character and physicality—many of the works feel expansive and ephemeral, without a body within them. (Occasionally, people appear in the peripheries.) The stakes can vary wildly: A janitor eats the tuna sandwich from his packed lunch, a woman tends to her garden, a father faces imminent death with a child in his arms. Lieber’s background as a psychoanalyst comes through obliquely in some poems that reference philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu holy text. These poems feel more academic and less organic in their approach than the others, but all the work seeks what lies beyond that which can be seen, felt, heard, or tasted.

It’s hard to find new ways to capture how the natural world compels us, but Lieber has a sure knack for finding the finest, smallest details to evoke a scene; even New Jersey can become a place of “verve and luster,” with “an alpine / picture window bathed in the afterwash of an afternoon’s ease” (“Concordance”). The emotional register of the collection never escalates to rage, true oppressive sadness, or frenetic joy; everything is tinged with “something less decisive than goodbye.” The prevailing mood of the work is something like melancholy, but not quite. The book has a pervading sense of the inevitable—each vesper of mist, each bird, each manifestation of sage feels like surrender. (Of course, that which cannot neatly fit into emotional boxes becomes the scaffolding for poetry.) These verses, as their speakers traverse Manhattan streets, weather storms in Chad, and navigate Long Island Sound, are for minds in transit, offering “an emptying / the chest hollowed out” (“Autumn Song”) and acceptance for what was and what will not be. “Of all the body / the hands ache the most,” Lieber writes; “The hands reach out / and float, the fingers kneading / the air in random rhythm, as if remembering / the first time absence had a face” (“New Suffolk”). As readers, we all have that face committed to the mind’s eye, made all the more beautiful because it will never be seen again.

A penetrating, measured group of poems exploring wonder, emotion, and the ways the world moves us.