The Looking House lays out a map of human suffering, from wars within
the psyche to wars that rage across the contemporary landscape. These
intense, innovative lyrics stir and disturb. Marchant maps the
shelters, the “precarious places” that give us refuge and “teach us
everything.” Such a place might be an open window at midnight in
childhood, or the broken sill of a deserted hut on the coast of
Donegal. In these poems a “looking house” can just as easily be a
locked ward, a barracks, a movie theater at midday, or that room in
Rome where Keats lay dying. These poems may show us a broken world, but
they also offer glimpses of survival and renewal, of trust and
re-connection.
“'What did/we have that any god would want?' asks Fred Marchant. In
these lean, passionate poems, Marchant tests illusions, tests faiths,
and makes things hard on himself. Whether visualizing childhood (in
which the father holds the son’s hand tightly 'as if it were the
cash'), or moments in adult life like leaving the Marines as a
conscientious objector, or a contemporary Iranian exiled writer who has
been tortured, or the 7th century B.C.E. Greek poet
Archilochus—Marchant brings clarity, compassion and inventiveness to
his task. These are true poems, tireless in finding ways to make truth
feel true."
—ROSANNA WARREN
“In a time of a historical nightmare, Fred Marchant manages to give us
a lyrical impulse that consoles. Few American poets, these days, tell
us the truth. But Marchant’s new book gives us dwellings, tears,
tenderness, flood, escape. In a time of lies and mediocre ironies in
literature, here is the voice that is never afraid to say what matters.
This is the poetry of home, yes—but the many doors and windows in this
book first and foremost ‘teach the heart how to be a heart.’ I read
these poems with joy.”
—ILYA KAMINSKY
