Philip Terman's new collection, My Blossoming Everything, embraces the multiplicity of the quotidian - what the philosopher/theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel calls radical amazement. Now all is quiet, the poet writes, save for those sparrows and Neruda/who, too, is blossoming again, the way we all blossom, /even the dead stars, each and every particle of dust/says its testament. My Blossoming Everything evokes the largest poetic themes through the intimacy of personal memory and empathy. Ranging from personal narratives to pastoral lyrics to elegies to odes, braiding love and marriage, childhood and parenthood, friendship, the life of nature and the life of poetry, My Blossoming Everything is a testament to the moments of attention in which the world blossoms.

it's the Sabbath ... // and my own child is sifting sand from sand on a summer morning //

so indescribably beautiful you can't help but grieve

The preciousness and resilience of Judaism lies within the effort of its adherents to hold both beauty and grief, even when the latter seems overpowering. And overpowering it has been time and again for the family of Jews around the world; for every individual family trying to make it through a silent dark of healing. The poems in Phil Terman's anthology delicately balance between the universalist and particular, between shtetl and suburbia, tenderness and tacheles, between unspoken names and those lovingly recorded. Most of all, these stellar and masterfully crafted poems are a testament to continuation against the backdrop of loss; a poetic Yizkor, an inventory of Jewish life.