About Kurt Heinzelman's The Names They Found There

In The Names They Found There Kurt Heinzelman creates a poetry of place with an unerring eye and ear for the ways that landscape can be mapped in the twists and turns of language. But these are also poems of person, the patient registration of one's engagement with place and ultimately with its history: "the swan's eye like a / mote of coal dust, that /splinter of history." As in his previous wonderful book, The Halfway Tree, Heinzelman displays, in equal parts, a mastery of sight, sound, and intellection.
—Michael Davidson, poet and editor of George Oppen: New Collected Poems

In these wind-swept lyrics, Heinzelman reveals the intimate and surprising rhymes between place and language. From his native Wisconsin where rural routes are named by letters of the alphabet to his travels abroad where false cognates work their sly magic, these poems artfully negotiate what we know by name and what we know by heart. These poems travel; each "road spills / its cargo of hooks." What a thrill to discover this etymology of place, of self.
—Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, author of Roam and Quiver

 

Civilities in Time of Civil War And through it all you were transposing in your head that difficult Falla farruca for cello, trying to recall where your brother sat upright compiling his list for the Party beneath the lamp's swinging buoy. Your faces flushed by the same low light, you remember how one of you brushed the other accidently on the shoulder, and, later on, in the "impact studies," how the victors would unfurl, now this way, now that, the gainsayers from the vouchsafers, how they preferred "taking umbrage" to "seeing red," and then lost sight—again perhaps forever— of how close everyone came to embracing.