Crossing to Sunlight Revisited

For the past fifty years Paul Zimmer has been writing poems about violence and cruelty as they appear in the schoolyard, in the daily experience of adults, and in the Nevada desert where he witnessed atomic bomb tests as a G.I. in a foxhole. His mouthpiece character, 'Zimmer' (with his gang of blue-collar cronies), is almost confessional at times, albeit with a grand sense of humor that tempers the bad news and convinces us that even in our worst moments we are not unique and therefore not alone. Who but Zimmer has lately studied the sky with such attention? Who else writes poems as accessible, and conveys our common stumbling with such understanding and forgiveness? If Americans looked for answers in real books, Zimmer’s Crossing to Sunlight Revisited would be riding in a lot of back pockets.

* author of Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 *

Were he an animal, Zimmer would be an elephant: 'Once in a while I'd charge a power pole / Or smash a wall down just to keep / Everybody loose and at a distance.' Were he a machine, he'd be an old train stoked with moonlight and atomic trauma and ripe apples whose circles revolve 'all the way / Out to the round ends of the universe.' Here he is, our original and robust bluesy American jazz romantic at his chosen best. Welcome to Ground Zimmer.

* author of Shoah Train: Poems *

I can't remember when I've read a book of poems I enjoyed as much as Zimmer's Crossing to Sunlight Revisited. Here is an entire life, distilled to a lovely, celebratory essence.

* 2004-2006 Poet Laureate of the United States *

I turn again and again to Zimmer's poetry to remind myself what the essence of all literary art is: the moment.

Zimmer's work is alone-truly unique-in its being recognizably different. He has had the genius to invent a style, and a whole imaginative outlook of his own, at a time when everyone thought it was impossible.