M.A. Vizsolyi’s A Lamp With Wings

by

Ilya Kaminsky

“Make it new,” Ezra Pound taught us, and: “only feeling survives.” It seems many contemporary poets have misunderstood him— they tend to make poems that are “new” in their structures, but utterly boring in content, or that contain lots of “feeling” but not a whiff of craft.

Michael Vizsolyi is a poet who can do both: he writes exquisite love lyrics that glide and sparkle with linguistic fireworks and yet are honest, direct, and memorable.

His poetry is erotic the way Catullus was erotic, and Mayakovsky. The voice is arrogant and tender, it goes “on the nerve,” as Frank O’Hara told us the poet must. This book will knock your socks off. This is real poetry.

-- Ilya Kaminsky