The Fire Landscape

Written during the first three "Covid Years," For Now, We Have Been Spared is a collection of complex sequences and carefully constructed shorter poems that reflect the uncertainty of living through a pandemic-not only in terms of the immediate threats to the body, but also the tectonic shifts in how we perceive the nature of existence itself.The opening sequence-a sustained, metaphorical meditation on the devastation caused by the multiple deaths of a friend's sons, sets a tone of elegiac reflection that runs throughout the collection. Near tragedies are paired with simple joys; sickness is mirrored by health; coming-of-age is followed by poems immersed in the experience of aging.These are poems that carry the weight of decades of observation and experience. Their subjects range from the commonplaces of domestic life to the public realm of politics. What binds all of them together is their grounding in sensory detail. Extended narrative is present in nearly every poem. The subtle cadences of prose poetry also make their presence felt. These poems are set in particular, recognizable places and populated by everyday people who find themselves confronting trying circumstances. Always, though, hovering at the edge of perception, there remains the possibility of redemption and grace.

In these essays, Gary Fincke combines a journalist's relentless investigations into the darkest corners of the human condition with an academic's love for arcana. In one essay, almost forgotten homeopathic recipes from the pantries of Pennsylvania Dutch country are interwoven with the panicked absurdities of elementary school health classes in the 1960s. In another, old case files of small town murders intertwine with meditations on all the fears, large and small, that accompany parenting. In The Darkness Call, Fincke plumbs the depths- child abuse, violence, illness, grief- not for their sadness but for moments of courage, hope, empathy, and light.

The poems in Bringing Back the Bones are startling intheir inclusiveness, juxtaposing history, science, myth,and popular culture with a narrative thread that risesfrom memory. Groups of distinctively individual poemsalternate with long poem sequences that range fromone based upon the difficulties of genius to one thatcontemplates the wondrous things that literally fall fromthe sky to the tile sequence, a meditation on the desirefor permanence.<BR><BR>As Robert Cording, author of Against Consolationand Common Life says, “Gary Fincke finds the wordsfor that lone, long labor of our lives that shapes who webecome and readies us for those moments when the‘possibility of happiness/surprise[s] us.’ He combinesthe empathy of Philip Levine for our ordinary livesand the thinking intelligence of Carl Dennis. His greatgift, like Levine’s and Dennis’, is the way he so casuallyconnects his own life to those worlds, his poems alwaysconvincing the reader with their intelligence, with theirsubtle wit and humor, and with their deep feeling asthey simultaneously strive for a history of permanenceand comically acknowledge our human failures.”