Event Horizon: New and Selected Later Poems

"Robert Pack has had a long and distinguished career as a poet and critic. I've always admired his clear-eyed intelligence and lyrical gifts. But taking in the whole of his work, including this complete volume of late poems, I was moved in a special way. There is an urgency and equilibrium here that is stunning. Pack has imagined a late style for himself that seems frictionless, free, and sublime. Reading the final section -- a whole book of new poems written as the poet approaches his nineties -- I was stunned by the ease of his line, an openness and wild simplicity that reminded me of late Wallace Stevens, for whom nature became more than just a source of metaphor and symbol but, as with Pack, a central and shaping intelligence. In these late poems, subject and object merge, and the poet's voice resonates, sounding in a wilderness that is beautiful and terrifying at the same time." -- Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems,1975-2015
"What an extraordinary gift Robert Pack, who has blessed us with poems for the past sixty-five years, has given us in this, his most recent volume! Where to begin? Let's begin with the strange, even unsettling title of Pack's new volume: Event Horizon . It's an astronomical term, it turns out, and signifies 'a theoretical boundary around a black hole beyond which no light or other radiation can escape.' In other words, a point of no return. And there you have it, Pack at his canniest, most quizzical, most plangent, and at the same time comic. And make no mistake: these poems will bear all those resonances and radiations out." -- Paul Mariani, Professor Emeritus at Boston College, author of Ordinary Time, among others
"Robert Pack's new poems are a treasure. They are the 'late new poems' of a compassionate sensibility, a tender heart, and above all the quiet courage of a man face-to-face with the inextricability of beauty and loss. They face the now and later of mankind, animals and nature in all its forms. The voice and imagery are seductive. In 'Call of the Lake,' the poet asks, 'Can human love contend with emptiness, with emptiness, with emptiness?' Robert Pack's long writing career shows that the answer is yes, yes and yes, even when in old age the idea of 'now,' means 'in the meantime.' These late new poems are both beautiful and wise, both heartbreaking and reassuring. One can learn from these poems how to survive." -- Marvin Bell, author of Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems