Chair in the Desert (2000)

Synopsis

The season is late summer. The cities are Philadelphia and Jerusalem. The wildernesses are desert and mountain. The voices are those of a man and a woman on paths where God and demons are at strife, on public beaches and city streets, in therapists’ offices and synagogues, in the Jersey Pine Barrens and at the Western Wall, at klezmer concerts and supermarkets, on boulevards, and in backyards and beds. Lament, lure, confession, enjoinder, boast, prayer, plea—the poems in Richard Chess’s Chair in the Desert pick up where he left off in Tekiah, his first book. These new poems invite us to rise and tremble in the presence of the new day and to make of our midnight wrestling and restlessness a psalm.

Reviews

From Scott Cairns, author of Recovered Body
In Chair in the Desert Richard Chess bears witness that even this world—the world of day labor, dispute, duress, psycho- and chemo-therapies—might be understood as a scene of betrayal and repentance, that the mind-numbing, heart-breaking, and soul-dimming circumstances of this world may nonetheless serve as scene for visitation, healing, and deliverance. May it be so.

From Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew and The Jew in the Lotus
In Chair in the Desert, Richard Chess touches together the magnetic poles of his experience—man and woman, Israel and Diaspora, religion and sex, I and Thou—and great sparks of soul fly and stun us with their light and power. Poetry, he implies, must be challenging—even threatening: “Where there is danger, I thought, there is a poem.” It’s surprising how he mixes the profane and the holy, the gasoline of sexuality and the sparks of religion—an explosive mixture.

Cynthia Ozick, author of The Puttermesser Papers and The Shawl
Rick Chess’s poetry is a glass through which one sees brightly, openly, gladly, thrillingly; and what one sees is the texture (the grain, the grip, the dazzling whorl) of holiness—holiness not as mere word or elusive meaning, but as experience. Here is the language of life—life conditioned, bound, tangled, yet illumined and clarified by a transcendent Eye. One reads these shiningly honest lines and feels their blessing.

From Shirley Kaufman, author of Roots in the Air: New and Selected Poems
Richard Chess’s profound involvement with desire and shame, human values and traditional religious faith, has more than fulfilled the promise of his first book, Tekiah. He continues to sound the ram’s horn—to awaken the sacred moments in our lives—this time in the lyrical voice of a woman seeking redemption through her sensual and spiritual “notebooks,” as well as in his own honest voice. These admirable poems, often visionary, many centered in a sensitive and powerful experience of Israel, are a startling Jewish Pilgrim’s Progress from first love to adult reconciliation.