The Blue Eye of Earth

Goldberg’s delightfully irreverent tone as she takes on subjects of monumental importance and her conclusion that none of it may actually matter in the end make The Blue Eye of Earth an amusing and worthwhile read.

Wisecracking, relentless, blindsided by loss—the speaker in this collection knows that if she’s to be redeemed at all it will be by how much she can conjure into her urgent songs: love poems to the world lost and the one present, even when it’s burning down around her. Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s tender, desperate poems, like Artaud’s actors, signal to us through the flames.

In The Blue Eye of Earth, Beckian Fritz Goldberg directs her puckish gaze at the harsh beauty of the Arizona badlands, the uncanny ache of an estranged childhood, and the confounding mysteries of body and spirit. Through fabular prose poems, gestural elegies, and brooding, discursive lyrics, Goldberg reminds us that the body’s ‘purpose / was always beauty, not justice.'

The sorrow only lasts as long as the love.’ That crushingly wonderful line speaks deeply of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s fascinations and wisdom. I’ve never known a poet who can recreate a moment with more detail and depth, who can reach through the present into multiple pasts and weave them together with the live wire of consciousness in such a way that I feel I’m watching someone look into and through a mirror at the same time. There’s a difference between loving life and loving the process of being alive, and Goldberg, the second kind of romantic, wants to see, touch, cherish, and remember the kinetic nature of . . . everything, a long list in a short life. At her core, she’s an elegist—‘we / can’t imagine that speaking is only speaking, even to the night, / the way we can’t believe death is only death’—one with the instincts of the historian and naturalist, to note and to hold. And since the love here is vast, so is the sorrow, but the love is so thoroughly embodied and expressed that the sorrow feels more like reward than burden. That transformation—that alchemy—is her gift.

Her poems are visionary in a rare and hardwon sense, for she seems to see more than the rest of us—because of our timidity or some lack of character—are willing to permit ourselves. Yet Goldberg’s broodings invariably transform themselves to a stance that is redemptive rather than despairing. (Previous Praise for Beckian Fritz Goldberg)

Beckian Fritz Goldberg is one of the most extraordinary poets of her generation, and her work continues to define the cutting edge of recent American poetry. (Previous Praise for Beckian Fritz Goldberg)

Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s poem noir aims the crosshairs of her telescopic sight at the difficulties of beauty … the language is lush, tough as nails, and right on the money. (Previous Praise for Beckian Fritz Goldberg)

There is a lot to be said for saying things straight, especially if. like Beckian Fritz Goldberg, you have the ear of an angel and a wildly passionate regard for words .... especially in the face of randomness and moral collapse. (Previous Praise for Beckian Fritz Goldberg)

In Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s poetry we have, as Clarence Brown said of Mandelstam, ‘that continuous sense of surprise which Mandelstam saw as the essential ingredient of all true art.’ Goldberg is a true and original poet, surpassing herself day by day. (Previous Praise for Beckian Fritz Goldberg)