Vigil
Alexander Long

“More than anything else, Alexander Long has subject, and with honed and original craft, this makes for voice, makes for poems we can believe and care about, enter and learn a little more of what it means to be human, to be here . . . . Long knows about the surface of poems, how to keep them fresh in syntax even though there is a story to be told, a part of a life to be examined. He knows telling detail and specificity that land a reader immediately in a scene. He knows phrasing and image-making in support of the emotional truth of the poem. He is never writing to the trend. Yet, you will hear an original rhythm, and where appropriate, like a jazz musician, you will hear homage, a riff quoted from a master. His work is mature; he has something to write about; it’s soul-making.”

—Christopher Buckley

“Alexander Long is master of the elegy in its truest sense, of the voice of pure longing, ‘All of us with our faces pressed / Up against one barrier / of light / Or another.’ His poems reach toward, and play a riff against, a multitude of voices: Wright, Matthews, Berryman, Dickinson, Sexton, Whitman, Muhammad Ali, a lover, and on and on. The result is a held blues note that yearns for what can’t ever be reached because it’s past, or too good to hope for, or both. Or rather, each poem is actually a chord, a transformative conversation of one sort or another, as in his poem ‘Berryman,’ in which Berryman, Whitman, and the poet—each ‘leaping / Off the memory of another’—manage to sing, momentarily, ‘At the top of a sycamore.’ The poems in Vigil are full of the song that arises from a skillful mind in concert with a fine and passionate heart.”

—Fleda Brown

“Alexander Long’s exciting Vigil, with its Whitmanesque embrace of a world filled with music, literature, history and the everyday ‘rotting angels / We are,’ is a vast landscape embraced by a masterful voice. Ranging through Aquinas, the holocaust, Coltrane and other jazzmen, Selma, Larry Levis and William Matthews, and a host of other references, and weaving them so adeptly with his fluid, emphatically measured lines, Long leaves us with a sense that we experience the process of making this landscape as it evolves. Indeed, this is a landscape we feel in all its physicality, and yet a world made ‘flesh becoming / Words beneath the quiet demarcations of the rain.’ It’s that quiet contemplation that allows Long to understand how ‘distance is still / An exile from the first love,’ and that we must constantly strive to close that distance. It’s a life work, as the saying goes, and forever ‘unfinished,’ forever pushing beyond the ‘agenda the dead / Stars have laid out.’ And this is a fabulous beginning for that work.”

—Richard Jackson

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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