“David Appelbaum’s Window with 4 Panes aims high: the poet in his “Overture” claims a prophetic mantle, aiming to speak a truth ‘beyond each simulation by language,’ over obstacles of ‘dislocation, displacement, dissonance.’ Appelbaum, whom we must thank for his work at New Paltz’s Codhill Press as well as for his poetry, acquits himself well, writing of big topics with a light hand using a spare, short line. The first section takes on mortality (‘sorrow/to the bone/all for petty things’), while the second traces a kind of coping, promising ‘survival is rare glory.’ `The garden must be praised,’ he declares, for pushing on in this ‘dangerous oxygen.’ The final poems are precise and authoritative, rather like oracular utterance.” – William Seaton, Chronogram
Originally published: 2009
