What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems

A New & Selected Collection from awardwinning poet Robert Bensen

The poems in WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE, new and culled from six collections, take place in the U.S., Caribbean, Indigenous Americas, Europe, and Arabia. Around the globe, lightning strikes 44 times each second. With luck, a poet gets hit six or seven times in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, Randall Jarrell said. For Robert Bensen, once was a calling: "...when lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming, / its rivers and rivulets flooded me with one idea: / in plain air, power makes infinite ways." Shakespeare said lightning "unfolds both heaven and Earth." Similarly, these poems manifest spirit in the world: in the child's devotion to dance ("Two Dancers"), the privations of Alzheimer's ("Quick Bright Things"), or a celebratory 50th-anniversary slog ("Rainforest"). They reveal forces deadly and vital: courage after injury ("Sonata for the Left Hand," "1959"), fear following a terror attack ("At a Solemn Wind Ensemble"), greed for gold ("Orenoque"). In sundry guises--a 12thCentury Japanese princess, a girl in Trinidad, Eurydice, and others--the voices in these poems deal with gender, racism, genocide, teenage hormones, rabies vaccine, eaglewatching, home repair, and worse. Between the mundane and sublime, Robert Bensen's lines illuminate with the force of revelation.

"Robert Bensen's poems reach wide and drive deep and ride on the strong motion of their making. Bensen can map the moment tellingly, but there is always a backdrop of historical awareness that grounds the lines. He knows, literally and figuratively, the 'lay of the land.'"--Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

"Robert Bensen's poems are filled with humor and wisdom, piercing imagery, and a vast range of striking stories. Central to all of this: the music! Vivaldi, Mozart, Meringue, a croak in a frog's throat, and Bensen's sensitive translations of Baudelaire, Degas, and Nizar Qabbani. Without a doubt, WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE is an electric book. It forks lightning." --Roger W. Hecht, author of Talking Pictures

"WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE documents a life devoted to poetry as a humane vocation seeking transcendence in a world of difficulty. Robert Bensen's sympathetic lens focuses on loved ones, aging friends, dancers, indigenous people, and questers historical and contemporary. The jawdropping range of his new poems embraces, among others, immigrant ancestors, a grade school fire drill, a wedding anniversary in a rainforest, a house consciously resisting needed repairs, and a Shostakovich quartet as a warning of world disaster. Bensen's expansive and capacious language celebrates this variety and illuminates it lovingly." -- Jay Rogoff, author of Loving in Truth: New & Selected Poems

"The poems in WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE involve unforeseen but extremelywell controlled shifts in diction, tone, and narrative--and before you know it, the poem is headed in a fresh direction that you eagerly follow. His voice is conversational, but capable of a haunting mystery, humor or poignance. This is a fabulous collection by an extremely talented poet."--Thomas Travisano, author of Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop

Poetry.