Loving the Days
John Witte’s poems are like hammer blows, accurate, solid, satisfying. His cries ring out in our desert, forlorn and too-soon wise. He is one of those poets who doesn’t suffer from being a modern, who is able to contain, under the same hat, what is rich and full and abundant (what we said we lost) and what is nervous and new and wild. It is his language that makes this possible, but behind the language his knowledge, and grace and sadness, the “tiny bell in his throat.” He is an important new poet.
-Gerald Stern
The Hurtling
Fierce, controlled, inventive, forward-rushing, refusing punctuation to make freewith syntax, John Witte’s cycle of severely unrepetitive three-line-stanza poems left me with endless questions and a durable satisfaction. There are poems here– “As If” is one – which I will never forget.
-Ursula Le Guin
Second Nature
Second Nature is a rich, ample, wide-ranging, mature work, showing this probing, watchful poet at peak strength. For Witte, poetry is often the same as flight and singing are for a bird, a simple, natural union of form and function that gives lift and grace.
-Floyd Skloot
Disquiet
The sixty-seven lyric poems that comprises John Witte’s Disquiet shed their beautiful lamplight on so many separate elements, beings and conditions, one can feel the loom of Neruda’s Elemental Odes, and hear in them, exquisitely, the voices and footfalls of one’s own life and the darkly marvelous lives of the imagination. This is an utterly distinctive volume, courageous, disquieting indeed, in its technical and emotional clarity, and in the amazing range of reference that includes us all. If you love poetry, you will love this book.
-Christopher Howell
All That
Matters Now
Tomas Tranströmer believed that beneath each poem lurks an “invisible poem,” a shadow reality that is metaphysically present yet beyond articulation. Few contemporaries embody this slippery, “invisible” poetic like John Witte. All That Matters Now is unabashedly engaged with the expression of the necessary, and these finely etched poems show us a writer of consequence adding another chapter to a growing spiritual autobiography. A stunning account of life’s beautiful and relentless machinations.
-Michael McGriffl
