Moments in Place

by Paul B. Roth

In Moments in Place, Paul Roth, with acute perception, threads the reader right through the eye of his natural surroundings, where he not only allows us to witness nature but become part of it. One can feel the moon on his lap as his hands “let go their grip on its craters and soft textures….” Or how his blood “…flowed its greenest red through a rhubarb stalk’s arteries.” We join the poet in his contemplative study of understanding and existential awareness “….as if after billions of years and through the vastness of this nothingness, our temporary lives were contrived.” He considers aging, time, loss of memory and the desire to speak with the dead and realizes “…just to see them/takes the same/speed of light/only our dreams/can achieve.”

—Patty Dickson Pieczka, author of Beyond the Moon’s White Claw

Over the decades Paul Roth has written a major corpus of poetry, finely attuned to the minute details of nature, yet always granting them their universal weight. By effacing himself in rapt observation of the red on a blackbird’s wings, or the sheer veils of snow on grey rock, he has enriched his poetic voice all the more. The Earth speaks through his words, in all its intimate particulars—but also as a blue sphere lost in space, moving through a cosmos beyond our grasp. His extraordinary new book, Moments in Place, invests his vision with a further note of clarity: the vantage point of old age, when life 'narrows us down through a thinning passageway to a life expectancy of zero.' Many of the moments here are memories, though he brings them into our present place without nostalgia, much less metaphysical delusions. In his work we are always gratefully aware—to paraphrase Oppen—of the reality that we confront.

—Hoyt Rogers, author of Thresholds

Paul B. Roth has been published widely in the United States and his work has been translated and appeared in journals from Japan, Peru, Israel, France, Bolivia, Italy, Ecuador, India, China, Mexico, Italy, Syria, Romania, Estonia and the UK. In both 2018 and 2020, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of seven collections of poetry of which his most current are Cadenzas by Needlelight (Cypress Books, 2009), Words the Interrupted Speak (March Street Press, 2011), Long Way Back to the End (Rain Mountain Press, 2014), Owasco: Passage of Lake Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Weightless Earth (Bitter Oleander Press, 2022). He lives in Fayetteville, NY where he’s served as editor and publisher of The Bitter Oleander Press since 1974.