Immediate Song

“The poems in Immediate Song are clear, perfect stanzas containing interior music, a man’s conscience, and his crystal reflections.”

“From its stunning long poem ‘On Hospitals,’ to its unflinching view of life ‘in the twilight of empire,’ to its quiet, deft, and subtly lyrical ‘song’ poems, Immediate Song is at once an extended elegy, a meditation on time, and a hard-won articulation of the largeness of small moments. Simultaneously ambitious and understated, these poems are unmistakably of today’s America, even as they mine the timeless concerns of loss and memory. Bogen is a brilliant and singular poet—wise yet unassuming, sharp yet unpretentious—with much to teach us about the complexities of living in the world.”

“Don Bogen’s haunting new book is a sustained meditation on the tension between transience and memory that we experience as time: ‘You are in there and it is all gone and there is nothing I can’t remember,’ he writes. Rich in observed and remembered detail, the work creates an immediacy that is deeply infused with historical and social awareness. From the elegance of extended discourse to the spareness of song, these poems resonate with exquisite beauty and wisdom.”

“What are we to do with grief and with all actual, abiding concerns when modernity steals such things away into labyrinthine media and into Acherons of bad, banal discourse? At such moments, an instance of true feeling becomes heroic. At such moments, memory becomes the most splendid resistance. In Immediate Song, Don Bogen is bold to say ‘Permanent’ (as in Love) and ‘True’ (as in Turquoise and Poplar). These are poems of exquisite reproach, and they may well save the day.”

“Energy and elegy suffuse the landscapes of Don Bogen’s poems in Immediate Song. The ‘song’ poems are literally musical while bracingly modern. A long poem in sections on hospitals extends the genre of that subject in American poetry, moving smoothly from acutely observed details to revelations gained through painful experience. Metaphors ring accurate and new. Bogen’s meditative realism reveals the ordinary and familiar to us in ways we had not articulated for ourselves.”