Drawing on forty years of published work, Jay Rogoff’s Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems marks a milestone in the career of this confident, wise, and rigorous poet. The volume presents over one hundred poems from earlier collections alongside forty-seven poems previously unavailable in book form. Throughout his body of work, Rogoff skillfully interweaves craft and feeling as he contemplates immigrant ancestors, foreign adventures, baseball, ballet, and the uncanny entwinings of art and life.
The new poems form three sharply etched sequences. In turn, Rogoff presents a series of short, wry poems in tribute to his wife and muse; reimagines Genesis’s story of the creation and fall in a progression of enigmatic ballads inspired by Lorenzo Maitani’s reliefs on the façade of Orvieto Cathedral; and expands upon a theme that has always suffused his art, the interconnectedness of love and death.
Both a valuable compendium of his finest work and a powerful introduction to his range of gifts, Loving in Truth offers a thorough immersion in the poetry of Jay Rogoff.
