This Crazy Devotion - Poems by Philip Terman

Publication Date: August 1, 2020
Paperback, 120 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-70-0

Available from Small Press Distribution

Philip Terman’s latest poetry collection begins appropriately enough with “Tormented Meshuggenehs,” “the crazy sages… / who dervished across the hayfields / and paused to yawp a parable to the cows about the seven beggars….” This passage announces much about the poetry that follows: that its craziness is of the order of devotion in the spiritual sense, rooted in Judaism; and also that it often takes place in bucolic surroundings, rooted in the land. And why is this a little surprising, this conjunction of Jewish life and rural setting? For Terman they are seamless and sacred, and by portraying his Jewishness as woven through a life and landscape familiar to many (non-Jewish) readers, he dispels stereotypes and creates a community of mutual recognition and understanding.

That would be virtue enough to applaud this collection, but it offers many other pleasures. “I am talking about this world, there is no other,” he declares in the long and lovely meditative “Garden Chronicle” that forms the final section of the book. Such a world it is, full of all of the things to which he is crazily devoted, all of the things he writes about with such acuity and tenderness in these poems: heritage and faith, social justice, poetry, even (in the title poem) almost meeting Bob Dylan – but foremost, his family and nature, both of which sustain him.

He communes with ancestors, a grandfather he was too young to remember, who must have sung to him over his cradle in Yiddish (and who, he supposes, just might have posed for Chagall). He imagines the radio interview his father might have given, replete with Borscht Belt humor, and recalls going for bagels with “the schlemiel… / who dated your sister-in-law / after your brother died.” He devotes the second section, “Of Longing and Chutzpah,” to memories of his mother, and in one of the most humorous and poignant moments recalls how in childhood his mother cut his hair to save money, an act Terman likens to “sculpting” him into all the things she might have wished him to be, “the boy she wants to be a mensch.” (Based on the accounting he gives here, she succeeded. She also carved out a considerable poet.)

Most of all, he writes of “The love of the long married,” of children “at the kitchen table / doing homework,” waiting on a school bus which arrives bearing all the hopes and happiness in the world. He gives the last word to the daughter whose question After Later? signifies “no set time, farther than the horizon, / on top of the sky, around the bend, outside this moment we’re in” when, perhaps, “all those things they said would happen / must surely have occurred.” Such a lovely description of faith,
so worthy of devotion.

Praise for Philip Terman & This Crazy Devotion

Traveling between Li Po and Chagall, between Aleppo and Pennsylvania, Philip Terman wants only one thing. What is it? He wants to grab each person he meets and shout: stay awake. Which is to say: Terman wants to share with us the ecstatics of our moment.

And at the heart of it all is what, exactly?

I find here deep emotion. Such as in the elegies for the poet's mother, which are memorable, and heart-breaking, and very real.

And around them go the devotions: between hospice patient wanting to write poetry and Larry Levis the grandmaster poet whose work continues to speak long after death. For devotions are in each of our moments, as these moments themselves become speech of days between parents and children, between Depression streets of Jewish Cleveland and Heaven.

These are moving, beautiful poems from the writer who knows how to live the days with his whole self, and how to put such days into words.

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

Philip Terman’s poetry is suffused with love—for his wife and daughters, for their garden and the creatures who share their land, for his parents and grandparents and his Jewish heritage, for prisoners and refugees, for the gifted and the grieving. To write of such matters, he tells us, he must temporarily withdraw into solitude, “so that I can meditate on our lives / and frame something beautiful.” There is abundant beauty here, as much in the framing of these stirring poems as in the earthy, mystical
matters of which he writes.

—Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works

Philip Terman takes us down “into / the wonder-hole” in this deeply elegiac collection. His austere tributes to the mother and the long dead, and to shuttered neighborhoods and ravaged Earth, stand beside homages to Larry Levis, to the Syrian poet Riad Saleh Hussein, and, in lovely portraits of desk, kitchen, and garden. The “wonder-hole’s” unique entry point into grave, soul-ash, and cosmos causes tremors throughout the book, working its magic in the unforgettable “The Exchange” and “Coda: put the book aside in the middle of the poem” and in poems examining fearsome yet seductive shadows of aging, parenting, and loving. Terman’s signature “serious sentimentality” is here too, in sparkling intermezzo: flowers and birdsong abound.

—Judith Vollmer author of The Apollonia Poems

Philip Terman is the author of five full-length and four chapbook collections of poems, including, most recently, Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press) and Like a Bird Entering a Window and Leaving Through Another Window, a hand-sewn collaboration with the artist James Stewart and bookbinder Susan Frakes. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Sun Magazine, Poetry International, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine, and 99 Poems for the 99 Percent. A selection of his poems, My Dear Friend Kafka, has been translated into Arabic by the Syrian writer and translator Saleh Razzouk and published by Ninwa Press in Damascus, Syria. He’s a professor of English at Clarion University, where he directs the Spoken Art Reading Series. He is a co-founder of the Chautauqua Writer’s Festival and coordinator of The Bridge Literary and Arts Center in Franklin, PA. Terman’s poems provided the text for three song cycles composed by Dr. Brent Register and, on occasion, he performs his poetry with the jazz band, Mark DeWalt and The Barkeyville Triangle. More information can be found at www.philipterman.com.