“I’d have thought these the lost poems of Alyosha Karamazov, come to light when so much poetry seems to have been written by Ivan.
The relentless lovingness of Michael Lavers’ poems at first tempted me to draw back, as an implicit judgement on whatever in me is unloving or petty or merely clever. But I couldn’t withdraw, since the poems–like love itself–simultaneously forgive the failures they reveal, and show us we are better than we know.
I worry that The Inextinguishable will be hard to take for readers who turn to poetry for a reflection of their own discontent and alienation. He is at home in beauty and joy. Lavers’ joyousness, though, is not a matter of attitudinizing but of formal technique. The variety of his rhythms and shapeliness of his lines and stanzas is love concretely embodied. And his cadences everywhere invite the presence of the departed greats they echo, and show him perfectly at home in their company.
A sterner challenge will be the book’s central thesis: that nothing, nothing will be lost. But it is a truth, and at least one of these poems already deserves a place among the inextinguishable poems of the English Language. You’ll know it when you see it.” –John Talbot