Bay Leaves

Bay Leaves, Jan Schreiber’s slim yet impressive new volume of poems, shows us a world alive with animal energy and enlivening beauty, defying Wallace Stevens – “The hawk will never think / that hawk and branch are one” – and imagining Heisenberg’s ode to his own uncer¬tainty – “Surely the race is over, but who won?” Schreiber’s acute observations of the natural world stand in effort¬lessly for our own deepest spiritual lives, just as his dramatic monologues fluently conduct wisdom gained from human suffer¬ing. These superbly crafted poems pulse with intellectual vitality, as we picture “phantoms of birds balance on branches in / the labyrinthine circuits of the brain.” Bay Leaves is a pure delight.

– Ernest Hilbert, author of Last One OutJan Schreiber’s Bay Leaves is uncommon, and uncommonly fine, in several ways. The voice is admirably measured in a time of verbal pyrotechnics, yet the writing is amply studded with mem¬ora¬ble strokes of diction and imagery. The surfaces in these poems are unusually trans¬parent, the better to reveal considerable, sometimes mysterious depths. Schreiber’s view of life is fundamentally tragic, but stoically so, and leaves ample room for humor including of the laugh-out-loud variety beauty, and love. And all of these virtues are delivered in formal verse of impec¬cable craft. Bay Leaves is both distinct and of distinction: a book whose modest compass affords more than enough room to move, intrigue, and tickle by turns.

– Daniel Brown, author of What More?