A Sonata Pome
Be Radiant, a work in four movements, gathers together scenes of celebratory brooding in the loving eye. Jacob Riyeff’s second collection of poems hopes for home in a passing world, resting in what we’ve been given while awaiting a new heaven and a new earth.
Faced by the specter of eco-catastrophe, what can we do to ward off anxiety and paralysis? We can contemplate and celebrate, as Jacob Riyeff does in this volume, that patch of the Earth which is our patrimony. Microscopically observed and lovingly curated, these lyrics articulate, layer by layer, a Midwestern landscape and time-scape radiant with the often-hidden beauty of life. Archaeology, geology, and botany fuse in a poetry that invites readers to unearth and reverence their own inheritance in our anything but common, Common Home.
–Laurentia Johns OSB, Stanbrook Abbey, England
Jacob Riyeff’s Be Radiant does precisely what it proclaims. Riyeff’s poetry comes in a variety of styles and forms, but each poem radiates with a sense of time and place. Riyeff, like the fungi he loves so much, is a poet rooted in place. His poems reflect this rootedness. Riyeff, as a scholar, is also rooted in the English language. He weds these two in poems like “The Ruin,” which is a translation of an Old English poem, and yet Riyeff places it before a burial mound in his home of Milwaukee. Consume these poems, and you will find yourself radiant as well.
–David Russell Mosely, poet and theologian
“Adaming creation beyond the Fall,” Jacob Riyeff-a Blakean hybrid of poet, mystic, and illuminator-brings us a new collection that visits “Paul the hermit in the desert”-but still has time to paddle his daughter out past the breakers under an afternoon sun. We see touches of earthy Kerouac, of nature-loving Wordsworth, all against a soaring, ancient spirituality. In “Spring Ephemerals,” he records, with telegraphic, haiku-like focus, intricate images of the damaged Wisconsin wilderness-dovetailing, later, with his translation of the Old English poem “The Ruin.” The sequence “Leads and Diggings” excavates his own family history through voice and narrative-and extends its core sample through the strata of geologic time. This poet is a hybrid of many pasts and worlds-in other words, an American original.
–Amit Majmudar, author of Twin A and What He Did in Solitary
Jacob Riyeff
is a teacher, translator, and poet. His writing focuses on the western contemplative tradition and the natural world. Jacob is a Benedictine oblate of Osage Deanery and lives with his family between the Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan.