Norman review's Burt Kimmelman’s Gradually the World: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2013 (BlazeVOX [books] 2013):
I was unfamiliar with the poetry of Burt Kimmelman when Jacket2 asked me to take up the assignment of writing about Gradually the World: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2013. Reading, rereading, pondering the volume — which is a life — has been an education for me in poetry’s use as engagement with writing as a means of being in the world. Why, after all, is anyone writing? Of necessity, I suppose, to figure out how to survive in — even appreciate — being alive temporarily in a world. Kimmelman’s poems surely serve that function for him and his readers. Here is a seriously committed poet who has felt through, thought through, and written into what and how a poem is — for a poem and for a life. In his important interview with Thomas Fink in Jacket in late 2010, Kimmelman cites John Taggart’s assessment of his work: that his poems “evince a quality infrequently encountered in contemporary American poetry: modesty, an attentive and forthright modesty. As such they are unassailable. They cannot be tarnished by our times’ endemic disease, the irony disease.”[1] That’s exactly right: Kimmelman’s poems are intelligent, admirably well wrought, almost classically so. They reflect straightforwardly usually tiny moments of lived experience, but never without care and pressure for the writing moment, a moment of working in and through words — yet they are, as Taggart points out, modest in their claims and tone. It’s as if each poem were shaking hands warmly with life, each careful word making no claims whatever for any larger meaning or understanding, and reaching out to hold hands with the reader too, in the embrace of the words of the poems.
Norman Fischer, “'Gradually the World': A review of Burt Kimmelman’s new and selected poems,” Jacket2 (July 15, 2014).