Swimming Home

Beautiful rhythms, surprises, driving pulse and panoramic view entwine with the inimitable thrust of walking, and looking, and noticing and thinking. There is deep pleasure in reading Vincent Katz’s Swimming Home. He’s got a fabulous eye out in the particulate roaring peopled world. I love these poems for their metabolism, immediacy, their dharmic politics and muscle. I want to swim home too and land where

Poetry can’t mean that much, everyone asleep

Another year, another weight of looking and thinking

About everyone, and then there is just music

And people walking by the shore, their humble

Bodies, their self-desires, their anguish, I see

I am a poet, I step on the same sand as Homer

Katz—an impressive Latin and Greek classics translator as well—is an inheritor of Frank O’Hara’s and Edwin Denby’s gait and startled amusement but takes us into a new zone with different urgency and perspective. I feel sane, awake and optimistic inside these meditatively alert poems. Just the right balance for the 21st century.

In Vincent Katz’s new book Swimming Home, the poet pulls out all the stops like a curator might at a posthumous retrospective, had they access to the breadth of gems that punctuated every skill of a single artist over a lifetime. The good news is that this book is not looking to explore the greatest hits of a departed Old Master, but rather the startling onward movement demonstrating the full range of humanity stretched before us, as broadly-gathered and carefully-constructed, of both a poet of the here-and-now and a poet whose language and experience represents the future. To be able to write this voluptuously but also this responsibly is certain to place Katz in a very exclusive canon of poets one can get lushly lost in & yet always trust.

Swimming Home is a group of poems written over the past fifteen years, in places as varied as São Paulo, Berlin, New York, the coast of Maine, Calabria, and Stockton NJ. One feels that Katz is indeed swimming home, that is, he perceives objects and people from the vivid, but often unreliable, motivated perspective of a swimmer, with sudden bursts of crystalline accuracy, as in the masterful “Sidewalk Poem” that closes the sequence. Here a whirlpool of visual particulars, ending with: “light is guide, beyond brick, granite, if you can follow, / in sky, on building, drifting off banner, on person walking,” is cut short by a moment of shocking certainty: “They may not think poetry’s important / but I know it is important.” After taking in Katz’s huge, teeming opus, few would disagree.