Bay Leaves, Jan Schreiber's slim yet impressive new volume of poems, shows us a world alive with animal energy and enlivening beauty, defying Wallace Stevens - "The hawk will never think / that hawk and branch are one" - and imagining Heisenberg's ode to his own uncertainty - "Surely the race is over, but who won?" Schreiber's acute observations of the natural world stand in effortlessly for our own deepest spiritual lives, just as his dramatic monologues fluently conduct wisdom gained from human suffering. These superbly crafted poems pulse with intellectual vitality, as we picture "phantoms of birds balance on branches in / the labyrinthine circuits of the brain." Bay Leaves is a pure delight. - Ernest Hilbert, author of Last One OutJan Schreiber's Bay Leaves is uncommon, and uncommonly fine, in several ways. The voice is admirably measured in a time of verbal pyrotechnics, yet the writing is amply studded with memorable strokes of diction and imagery. The surfaces in these poems are unusually transparent, the better to reveal considerable, sometimes mysterious depths. Schreiber's view of life is fundamentally tragic, but stoically so, and leaves ample room for humor including of the laugh-out-loud variety beauty, and love. And all of these virtues are delivered in formal verse of impeccable craft. Bay Leaves is both distinct and of distinction: a book whose modest compass affords more than enough room to move, intrigue, and tickle by turns.
- Daniel Brown, author of What More?