Irving Feldman Usable Truths: Aphorisms

Literary Nonfiction. Irving Feldman is one of the USA's finest poets. Approaching his 91st year, he has brought together a collection of aphorisms he has been at work on for several years."Irving Feldman writes with an immediacy, vigor, and precision of insight that make this book an exhilarating achievement. Again and again, one is brought to consider the claim of unwelcome doubts as well as unsolicited truths. His discipline and economy of phrase can survive comparison with the masters of the aphorism."?David Bromwich"Aphorisms, shrewd observations, rules to live by and rules to resist?such are Irving Feldman's USABLE TRUTHS. Some produce short, sharp shocks of recognition; others need to be lingered over and lived with, unpacked like a line of metaphysical poetry. In each the fewest words enfold the fullest meaning. Like aphorists before him, Feldman looks at love and age and the way we live now, but he brings a poet's touch to even his most philosophical insights. USABLE TRUTHS is thus what the French call a perfect livre de chevet, a book to keep on a bedside nightstand, ideal for those moments before sleep when we reflect on the strange turnings, the hits and misses, in our own lives."?Michael Dirda"'Usable' because these aphorisms invite us to trace?with mordant wit but also pity, and a strange courtesy?the secret life of our loves, hatreds, wonders, lies, and vanities, our forms of praise and styles of doubt, to trace their secret gifts and secret wounds, wherein we and others around us may gain and lose more than we think. They ask you to work on your creaturely listening."?Kenneth Gross"USABLE TRUTHS is an aphoristic treasure chest. It invites the reader to reach in up to the elbows, certain to retrieve marvels of insight, satire, deflation of our vanities, celebration of our generosities, wordplay for the play's sake, sentences built to please, provoke, press us into self-knowledge."?Alicia Ostriker"In USABLE TRUTHS, Irving Feldman joins Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Blake, Emerson and a handful of other epigrammatists who alert us, with their laconic wit and wisdom, to the mansions that the mind can build in and from the smallest rooms of incisive thought. These nuggets contain a trove of riches."?Willard Spiegelman