The Horses: New & Selected Poems

This new and selected brings together a dramatic sweep of poetry from one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best-loved poet-critics. Four of Richard Silberg’s books are included here, beginning with his first, Translucent Gears, published in 1982, through Doubleness, published in 2000. A previously unpublished long narrative-meditation interweaves a coming-of-age memoir, the Lurianic Cabala, and pure lyrical sections, topped off with a sharp, striking suite of new poems.

 

This is a book that masterfully balances several poetic strains rarely found together in a single body of work. The writing is accessible, presented in the form of narratives, descriptions, and dramatic monologues, but Silberg is also an adept of the image, of the poetic figure that leaps to epiphany. In yet another direction, a number of these poems move towards a kind of pure saying. Silberg’s puns and language play on themselves at the threshold to philosophy. His sensibility is born out of the counterculture—warm, sexual, mystic, by turns funny, tough, and elegiac. He’s a maverick, a singer, and an entertainer who believes in William Carlos Williams’ maxim, “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”