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Burned Kilim is a collection rich in particulars, filled with both displacement and a sense of place and self that transcends borders and boundaries. So Pesich speaks of "the hive in my own chest" and a "shrapnel of crumbs," of foods through which one tastes the flavors of other lives. "When I listen to the silence / I begin to remember my address." Out of that silence, Pesich has carefully and beautifully crafted these heartfelt poems.
A L A N B R I T T
The poems of Burned Kilim engage you, draw you into the intimate existence of another human being, the world of a sensitive and imaginative individual who has carefully cultivated his poems from a language of experience. Indeed, this is the goal of most poets. What is unique here is that Robert Pesich achieves that goal.
P A U L B. R O T H
Burned Kilim tears the corner off a life into which we watch it create itself through every mesmerizing aspect of the poet's life. Tension between language and experience is transcended by Pesich's ability to look back through this life at significant steps taken to reach it which, at the time, seemed haphazard and mysterious. His work is that looking back without any of the pretentious self-consciousness that pervades most of our post-modern poetry. Reading it from cover to cover releases a freshness to one's spirit that rarely shines through the constant degradation to which every citizen in our society succumbs.
A L E X A N D E R L O N G
The voice and landscapes of the poems are equal parts Eastern European and American, and more often than not surprisingly fresh. Like Simic, Milosz, Szymborska, and Zbigniew Herbert before him, Pesich (isn't) reluctant to work the fabulous into the everyday, the lyrical into the mundane, the luminous into the rubble. Perhaps one of the more attractive aspects of Burned Kilim are the pervading colors. Red, gray and black dominate the collection and work as a motif, unifying the collection, surfacing in many forms: rubies, blood, wine, tomatoes, chili peppers, flames, the glow from a television, gutted buildings, bombed bridges, and exhaust from trains, cars, factories, and concentration camp incinerators. This sort of stark contrast, found in a variety of images across the collection, supply Pesich's poems with their elegiac resonance.
C H R I S M A N S E L
Mr. Pesich writes with a vocabulary that could stand deep inside of freezing waters and still lean down to rescue a salmon that was disoriented. The poems are imaginative, and the message is capable of presenting itself one by one, poem by poem. Like a thunderclap of rain slowly moving down the river, a haze of steam preceding it, Burned Kilim thrusts itself into the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and homes of every description. This book is a constellation not to be confused with a fireworks display; it will not burn up and fade away.