In his third collection, The Latitude of a Mercy, Stefan Lovasik offers a testament of unflinching immediacy, conflicted sensitivity, and lyric grace&emdash;poem after poem, wise without presumption, pared down to a breed of silent speech, the stubborn legacy of what must be said and all that never can.
Lovasik brings into striking focus the landscape of war, the lasting physical, moral and psychological consequences of it, and the resilience of the human spirit.
The Latitude of a Mercy is a timeless, deeply moving and luminous book. |
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The responses to war in our literature are as varied as its many authors over a long period of time, but what the best of it—from Homer until the present—has in common, is the direct, unadorned presentation of the brute facts of war and the subsequent lingering physical and moral consequences war imposes on its survivors.
Stefan Lovasik's poems collected here take their place alongside the best of it—the most direct and most powerful, artistic representations of war in poetry. His poems reveal a stripped down and shockingly real encounter with what most of us cannot even imagine, so that his reemergence again on the other side, among us with his stories reconstructed over many years of grief, is all the more amazing.
I believe it is possible to understand things about what combat does to human beings from reading these poems that you can’t find anywhere else. That’s why there is an urgency here, why I want you to read this book now so that these poems can help empower all of us to resist our inclination towards war, and to love peace. There has never been a worthier purpose than that for poetry.
—Bruce Weigl
Evocative, visceral, and deeply affecting, The Latitude of a Mercy serves as a stark reminder of war's devasting and lasting implications. Lovasik takes us into spaces of love and shadow, death and survival, moving through internal and external landscapes to draw out and reckon with humanity's conflicting potential for both great destruction and immense compassion. In the visual retellings and exquisite brevity of many of these lines, we find a poet grieving the endless repercussions of war: "To see the prayer written in the eyes/Of those left behind, to hold them/Until we remember nothing/But light, and die into grace/As the prayer that can never be denied." Each poem bears the heaviness of its own need to be written while teaching us that faith, in a world so full of hurt, is more about what we create for ourselves and each other. From here, we can begin to remember, to choose not to forget, and as Lovasik reiterates, to seek solidarity with the dead: "We found our death, our voice in the song of the dead alone."
—Mai Der Vang
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