Letters to Early Street by Albert Flynn
DeSilver is a whimsical epistolary experiment, a turning of the traditional
letter onto it’s poetic ear. Originally begun as letters to a
colleague, the writing soon transformed into imaginative discourse
with the vagaries of a “muse,” addressing emotions, elements
of landscape, and the act of writing itself. Letters to Early Street
reconstructs “correspondence” as an exchange of ineffable
narrative filled with the pleasures of existence. Life is where odd
oppositions find agreeable and virtuous balance; where words are meant
to incite the insightful. With humor woven delightfully into each
missive, DeSilver takes poetry into a fresh act of communication.
Letters to Early Street is a beautiful collection, lyrical and inventive,
in which shapes are to be seen “noodling along a rather lengthy
road of torque & vapor.” The world is astonishingly present
yet there are “multiple enigmas,” those mysteries and vacancies
where beauty clings, as it must, to its cave. Creating a “community
nerve garden,” the poetry of Albert Flynn DeSilver is of a high
order of attention, like sitting at the rear window of a moving train.
—Paul Hoover
How to shed a dilemma: Be eager/bright
and good-hearted/nervous as Albert Flynn DeSilver’s poems, hunkering
down (as they are often seen to do) along a bush-strewn hillside to
open a can of chili before the fog returns. “A number that charts
vacancy’s bucolic spread” —and there’s his music,
spoonfuls of it, “eye to air & back,” an alto lift.
—Bill Berkson
Albert Flynn DeSilver’s work is filled
with a sunny, kinetic plenitude
—Richard Silberg
Albert Flynn DeSilver is a poet, teacher,
visual artist and publisher living in Woodacre, California. He received
a BFA in photography from the University of Colorado, and an MFA in
"New Genres" from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is
the author of many books and chapbooks including most recently Walking
Tooth & Cloud (French Connection Press, 2006) and Some Nature
(The Non-Existent Press, 2004). His poems have appeared in dozens
of literary journals worldwide including Zyzzyva, New American
Writing, Jacket, Poetry Kanto, Van Gogh’s Ear, Hanging Loose,
Exquisite Corpse, and many others. He is also the editor and publisher
of The Owl Press, publishing innovative poetry and poetic collaboration.
He teaches as a California Poet in the Schools in San Francisco and
Marin County, California.
