Door to a Noisy Room
Door to a Noisy Room
Peter Waldor
2009 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry Finalist
“Waldor’s spare irony—sometimes tender, sometimes bawdy—deals in dichotomies: love and hate, frailty and strength, fear and faith. These elliptical and colloquial lyrics draw equally from parable, prayer, and elegy. Hesitating on the threshold between isolation and community, the poet focuses a distortingly accurate microscope on what matters in our lives. “. . .familial, humane, and loyal to the good people and the simple delights of this world.”
—Publishers Weekly
January 2008
ISBN: 9781882295661
Available in print and digital formats.
Peter Waldor is the author of Door to a Noisy Room (Alice James Books), The Wilderness Poetry of Wu Xing (Pinyon Publishing), and Who Touches Everything(Settlement House), which won the National Jewish Book Award. His book-length poem, Leg Paint, appeared in the on-line magazine Mudlark. The Last of the Original Forms is forthcoming in 2015 from Settlement House. His work has appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and Mothering Magazine. Waldor works in the insurance business and lives in northern New Jersey.
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Additional Praise:
“. . .The reader must learn to forfeit expectation and simply tune in, like listening to a koan…these poems generously reward the concentration their language demands. Waldor asks us to listen to the noisy world as he hears it, and he opens our ears.”
—Boston Review
“What strange rooms and quirky music Waldor’s poems open onto. His vision proves to us that the imaginal and the rational share equal claims on perception. The heart/mind of this work spiritualizes the material and materializes the soul.”
—Li-Young Lee
“Door to a Noisy Room has the darkness, glitter, and hardness of obsidian. In this work, the heat of the passions has cooled to an elemental simplicity. Like obsidian the poems have been polished into jewels or napped to the keenest blade. They are beautiful and they are sharp.”
—Lynn Emanuel
“It’s such a delight when something catches you by surprise and makes you read on—and on. So it is with Waldor, a superb lyric, gnomic and gnostic poet. Poems like ‘Sadder than Abraham’ or ‘Dancer’ or ‘Ebed Melech’ are amazing.”
—Gerald Stern
“This space is left empty to create a white space. To create a white separation block in these individual book pages, add a Quote Block”
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