Read of the Month: “Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems” by Hank Lazer

Eclectic in theme and form, powerful in reach, and electric in impact, Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems (Chax Press 2025) by poet, scholar, and educator Hank Lazer is an intelligent collection of works selected from fifteen prior books, as well as new poems. This generous sharing of his poetry spans the years from 1994 to the present. With poems that dazzle in their sweep, these are works that range far and near, but with a refined aesthetic and an introspective, even pensive core. Frequently spiritual, often meditative, intricate and imaginative, and at times strange, Lazer’s work spins a sleight of hand intensity, as if he can conjure a kind of magic with language and image.

An intimate, long elegiac poem written in diary form entitled “Deathwatch for my Father” is at the emotional center of the collection. Lazer in his informative end notes says of this poem:

“Deathwatch for My Father,” which tracks my father’s final months, test[s] out the capacities of innovative poetry in the face of the death of a loved one. The book explores relationships with the dead—from my father, to John Cage, to George Oppen—while also projecting forward to ask “to what are we ancestral.”

“Deathwatch for my Father,” which is excerpted from Lazer’s book, Elegies & Vacations (Salt Publishing 2004), is both exhaustive and restorative, as well as allusive yet clear. That this poem can hold such apparently different qualities at once is a mark of Lazer’s rare talent and his way of presenting something with so many layers and meanings. In an introductory note, poet, scholar, and critic Susan M. Schultz says this poem “changed my life, giving me access to grieving through poetry, …”

In capturing the pathos and raw emotions of his father’s death, Lazer also captures the dying man’s humor:

…you say

from your hospital bed

“henry the one thing i

regret about this disease

is that i have it instead

of moamar khadafy”

Certainly, Lazer conveys the love between the father and son with lines like “we do mostly at my / urging cry together / and say out loud / our love for one another.”

Among the poetic forms within “Deathwatch for my Father,” Lazer uses the acrostic technique to spell out his father’s name using the first letters of that name as a capitalized letter within the stanzas. The acrostic portion opens with:

Perhaps more harrowing than the elegy for his father is Lazer’s poem “Deathwatch for My Mother, Wendy Lazer,” which originally appeared in When the Time Comes (Dos Madres Press, 2022). With lines like “morphine     every hour / alternating terror & rest,” the poem is heart-poundingly visceral. After telling how his mother sees “an angel in the room,” but does not know the angel’s name, Lazer concludes with this stanza:

& the angel does not

bring comfort or peace

when the door is open

the entire hall can hear your screams

Other poems in the selections from When the Time Comes include lines that are more comforting, such as “love goes by other names  / an invisible force / underneath each moment.” Equally intense, too, are potent lines that include those grappling with the whole mystery of death, such as “you are becoming what is / next” and “a glimpse / of the mystery / all that our eyes can bear.”

References in this review to these elegiac poems are not to imply that Abundant Life is filled only with melancholy poems of death and grief, though the “Deathwatch” poems are certainly heart-wrenchingly compelling. Among the diverse topics in Abundant Life, there are poems of seeking and learning, skepticism and spiritualism, meditation and gratitude. And as the use of the word “abundant” implies, there is great appreciation expressed for the rich fullness of life. Lazer writes “is there ever / enough / of being here / to notice / & to thank” and “i love this world / more / than i had thought.”

In the poem “Duncan Farm November Meditation” some of these varied themes flow together in a seamless reflection. Duncan Farm in Pickens County, west Alabama, Lazer explains in an email, came into his family through inheritance on his wife’s side, from her father, Dab, and her Uncle Cooter. He says, “As Abundant Life shows, Duncan Farm has become a sacred place for me—to read, write, meditate, photograph, take the dogs for runs.” He calls the farm “an unexpected (unmerited) gift—which makes no sense to a Jewish kid raised in San Jose California.”

Lazer’s appreciation for Duncan Farm comes through richly in the “November Meditation” poem. The sense of wonder found in many of his other poems appears again in lines like “what lies beyond the limits of our attention / sit with eyes open wide.” The poem moves from “what died with father” to descriptive lines like “small dance of wind  / from cedar to oak,” to this conclusion: “each / has an instrument / idiosyncratic / played / or simply listened to / be still & listen.”

Lazer’s poems seem sometimes to seek connections in a way where such connections are not readily apparent. In a poem selected from Poems Hidden in Plain Sight (PURH 2016), he writes “Kin as I am to an earthquake in Hawaii” and then observes that both coffee and fall flowers “alter my relationship to time.”

There is also a burst of rage in the poems selected from COVID19 SUTRAS (Lavender Ink 2020). In these works concerning the COVID pandemic, Lazer ventures into politics but mostly stays with the human cost and pain.

& who

will be

the last person

with you

 

& who

will be near

but unable

to hold your hand

 

& who

will tell the story

of what

the numbers mean

The poems collected in Abundant Life originate from handwritten notebooks. In the introduction, poet and author Rodger Kamenetz (best known for The Jew in the Lotus) states that Abundant Life “is a book of books, a Golgonooza of dozens of notebooks.” Lazer, in his end notes also references these notebooks, including acknowledging in one particular case that he has “no recollection of how or when I received the beautiful brown leather-bound notebook in which [P I E C E S (blazeVOX, 2022)] was written.”

Among Lazer’s varied forms and styles originating in these notebooks, including the acrostic form used in part of “Deathwatch for my Father,” are the imaginatively crafted “shape writing” poems. These shape-written poems are concentrated in the excerpts from N18(Complete) (Singing Horse Press, 2012), Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27) (Negative Capability Press, 2018), Slowly Becoming Awake (Dos Madres Press, 2019) and Thinking in Jewish (Lavender Ink, 2017) among other selections. Lazer’s notes describe these shape-writing works as “one-time improvisatory compositions in abstract shapes” and representing a kind of “vectored thinking.”

Along with shape-written poems, Lazer also utilizes an “invented 54 word form” in the poems originally appearing in the collection Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009). He explains: “My form for each poem became 3 X 18 = 54 words, the building block of 18 being a mystical Jewish number. I followed the Torah-portion mode of naming by picking a key word as the title for each poem.”

He also utilizes very short lines in poems throughout the collection, explaining that use of such short lines “made me think more fully about the multiple possibilities of line breaks – the way the line break offers both a discontinuity and a space through which one reads to connect.”

Given the variations of form, the complexity, and the depth of their meanings, these are not poems one should read casually or quickly. Yet if one examines and savors the works, many meanings emerge—and much beauty. In the end, a review such as this can never truly communicate the scope, the meditative quality, the vibrancy, and the sheer intensity of Lazer’s comprehensive, inventive collection. One needs to explore and experience these poems for oneself. As Lazer writes in a poem originally from Slowly Becoming Awake (N32) (2019) “keep on reading    keep on breathing.”

Hank Lazer

The author of 37 books, Hank Lazer was awarded Alabama’s top literary award in 2015, the Harper Lee Award, for a lifetime of achievement in literature. Originally from California, Lazer has made Alabama his home since 1977. Educated at Stanford, with a PhD from the University of Virginia, he moved to Tuscaloosa to teach at the University of Alabama and later added a very rural Carrollton, AL to the mix through Duncan Farm.

Though Lazer retired from the University of Alabama in 2014 after 37 years there, he continues to teach innovative seminars on Zen Buddhism and Radical Approaches to the Arts for the Blount Scholars Program and OLLI. Formerly, his positions included Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Executive Director of Creative Campus, and Professor of English.

Along with Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems, Lazer has published a companion volume of essays, poetics, and interviews: What Were You Thinking: Essays 2006–2024 (Lavender Ink 2025).

To learn more, visit Lazer’s website: https://www.hanklazer.com