Glass Enclosure

Fulfilling the tenacious imagination through all its methods and obsessions, this brilliant new collection by a poet who is also a critic of jazz form and free-verse prosody speaks to the very core of all lyric concerns. Charles O. Hartman’s poems are cool and dizzying, a dark, witty fusion of jazz sensibility and computer-generated texts. With innovative grace, Glass Enclosure confronts our very systems of understanding, the languages that enclose us even as they reveal the world.

Talk about surprises, talk about bending old structures into something new and vibrant, Charles O. Hartman’s Glass Enclosure dares us to peer into a lyrical funhouse-maze at the beautiful and bizarre which enlighten and amaze. Of course, we are a great deal wiser when we emerge from his galaxy of music and tonal imagery.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Charles Hartman’s poems are never predictable, always absorbing. I have been a fan for twenty years.

James Merrill

Hartman is a poet of sly puns and wit, of emotional depth, precision, and intellectual scope. The overall tone is cool but not distant, with the authority and intimacy of the best jazz. . . . Hartman’s wide-ranging and inventive mind is one of the luckiest writing. His poems are our good fortune.

Pamela Alexander, The Boston Book Review

Honeydew

As the poem paces down Main Street
on its way to the sparkling harbor
it knows to notice tints on the pigeons' backs
but "tends to forget" the man heaped on the stoop.
The better the poem knows its business
the smaller its business needs to be.
Its shoes are tied, its jacket buttoned up;
its pockets are sewn shut. The man wonders
if the poem has any money, but the poem
has no money, is proud of not having any money,
of having only the sun to make gold of the sidewalk
and glamour the water in the harbor awaiting it.
A hole the size let's say of a honeydew
passes completely through its chest.