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Close Escapes
Navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor, Close Escapes searches for an answer to our earthly existence by way of visions only the blind can see.
“Never 'in' time,” Stephen Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory. In one poem, Kuusisto is “the blind kid again,” pressing his finger to a cornered spider. In another, he walks down a harbor in Helsinki, “still twenty-three among the Baltic gulls.” Adrift in time and place—Tallinn, New York, a Velamo monastery—our anchor is the poet, navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor. As Kuusisto moves forward through meditations on beauty, “dark joy,” loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past—Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo. In one scene, Kuusisto ponders death, asking Bach to “Tell [him] of the galant flourishes / As we leave this life.” Readers, alongside Kuusisto, are left reaching for that “frail wisdom,” for an answer to the question of our earthly existence. We find tenderness in our human connections, both lasting and fleeting, sometimes gone. We drift onward, learning to find “music in human silence.”
“Never 'in' time,” Stephen Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory. In one poem, Kuusisto is “the blind kid again,” pressing his finger to a cornered spider. In another, he walks down a harbor in Helsinki, “still twenty-three among the Baltic gulls.” Adrift in time and place—Tallinn, New York, a Velamo monastery—our anchor is the poet, navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor. As Kuusisto moves forward through meditations on beauty, “dark joy,” loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past—Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo. In one scene, Kuusisto ponders death, asking Bach to “Tell [him] of the galant flourishes / As we leave this life.” Readers, alongside Kuusisto, are left reaching for that “frail wisdom,” for an answer to the question of our earthly existence. We find tenderness in our human connections, both lasting and fleeting, sometimes gone. We drift onward, learning to find “music in human silence.”
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
Published April 22, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 21, 2026
“In me is this eye this stream this wind,” the poet muses—and these attempts to make sense of it all, a sightless seer into the nature of things. “Open your eyes Close your eyes / It’s the same” (p. 35).
“Ghosts
In the grass at dusk
Silly he thinks
A cricket animism
No one to tell
But himself
Which is the punch line
(p. 29)
“It was Mary Shelley who said
The beginning is always today
The start our monster”
—from “I write: “if I could command you,” p. 31
Favorite Poems:
“Ghosts”
“I write: ‘if I could command you’”
“Old baseball glove”
“No one calls your name quite like the birches”
“I am”
“I dreamed last night of a friend whom I insulted”
“Every morning the wisdom of trees”
“A poem a day sometimes two”
“Ghosts
In the grass at dusk
Silly he thinks
A cricket animism
No one to tell
But himself
Which is the punch line
(p. 29)
“It was Mary Shelley who said
The beginning is always today
The start our monster”
—from “I write: “if I could command you,” p. 31
Favorite Poems:
“Ghosts”
“I write: ‘if I could command you’”
“Old baseball glove”
“No one calls your name quite like the birches”
“I am”
“I dreamed last night of a friend whom I insulted”
“Every morning the wisdom of trees”
“A poem a day sometimes two”
April 25, 2025
I suspect I will be rereading these poems many times. My favorite section is "Nordic Zen", which I think spoke to my ancestry in that my grandparents came from the Aland Islands, a Swedish speaking but Finnish archipelago in the Baltic.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews