Links to Writing
Poetry
“What Holds Us” Verse Daily
“Too Much Breath” Fogged Clarity
“On Sleeping and Not Sleeping” Stirring: A Literary Collection
“On Remembering” Stirring: A Literary Collection
“Thrill Wanting Wormhole” The Puritan
“Exploding Days” Redheaded Stephchild
“Giving” Timber
Book Reviews
Review of René Char’s The Brittle Age and Returning Upland in Rain Taxi
Review of Srečko Kosovel’s The Golden Boat in Rain Taxi
Review of John Minczeski’s A Letter to Serafin in Many Mountains Moving
Miscellany
Music reviews on my blog at Write Rock
Essay on digital publishing and literary pursuits in Numéro Cinq
Poems and info on the Colorado Poets Center
An interview / conversation about Too Much Breath with Jon Cone at his blog, A Cabinet of Ordinary Ferocities
A Happy Human Disaster
“Time wishes with the vigor of heartbeats,” Martin Balgach writes in a poem dedicated to Tomaž šalamun, and like šalamun, like all major poetry, this book is filled with stunning, often paradoxical language that attempts to at once come to terms with and surpass, even defeat time, and always provides unique perspectives. “I dance through time / like a sloppy ballerina,” he says at one point, and yet “The clouds / are showing me their liver spots,” he says at another point, for beyond his own perspective is a cosmos that both threatens and beckons with its potential “nothingness.” Beginning with a short history of the self and ending with the self “crawl[ing] into forever / holding my own hand,” there is, in between, the notion that “every heartbeat is a highway” leading to the hope that “Maybe our aches / aren’t different than our joys / and tomorrow is a fruit.” If so, then we are given a feast here, the fruits of a poet’s meditation that we dare not ignore and indeed must dare to embrace.
-Richard Jackson, Author of The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems
Too Much breath
Most poets are satisfied to be motivated by the certainty of memory, even by the stories that are “hiding / in the jowls of our dead.” But Martin Balgach in his very wise Too Much Breath knows memory is something we have to fight with our vision of an unknown future, which is why he says in one poem “I want to be inside things I’ll never know.” The result is a perceptive and engaging poetry marked by paradoxes where he wants “to lose everything I’ve never had.” The stakes are that high: the loss even of loss. At once philosophical and heart rending, this is a terrific book that pulls the curtain away from our easily satisfied nostalgias to reveal unsettling truths. But it never ends there, nor does a poetic quest like his end there, for Balgach is the real thing, and his poetry is a life’s work, as William Matthews once quipped, for a poet who can imagine, in the face of such loss, how eventually his “old heartbeats / vibrate to the stars.”
—Richard Jackson
Please visit Main Street Rag’s online bookstore to order Too Much Breath
The poems in Too Much Breath seem spoken from the eye of a hurricane of both the world’s and the self’s making, a vantage point that promises no easy abidance of strife. But somehow the Hericlitean notion that justice IS strife is summoned, embodied, blooded, and set about to walk and think and feel and wonder in a verse commensurate to the energies it cannot live without. Martin Balgach combines an eastern European visionary temperament with gritty American experience, not by pattern, but anew, poem after poem, to remind us that poetry is, yes, of our earth, but that this is exactly why it can take from the celestial, for as his wonderful poem “Warmth” says on behalf of the sun, “We are kept alive by a star.” This is a terrific debut.
—William Olsen