Samuel Menashe is that guy you've heard referred to at literary gatherings as "that poet that nobody reads." This is not entirely accurate as his promoters and even defenders have included Dana Gioia and a significant British following. Odd though, that his real fame should happen across the pond from his home base of New York. Still, he may be finding increasing favor here in the States, and well he should as he is a master poet.

He recently received the Neglected Masters Award, which comes with a hefty check of $50,000 from The Poetry Foundation, and publication of his New and Selected Poems by the Library of America due out in October. Menashe pens the introduction and remarks that he has stayed outside the literary community and Po-biz shenanigans. He has not gone the route of teacher, critic, essayist, and stayed largely within his own artistic realm. Edited by Christopher Ricks, the collection offers a generous and careful preface that will locate new readers of Menashe in the right mindset for engaging the poems.

So, a neglected master? We know what can makes a poet easily neglected, but why is he being hailed as a master? First, it is important to note that Menashe is not flashy, nor attached to a school with cache neither a physical school not a movement nor does the work fit into the fashion(s) in poetry of the day. The poems might seem unsexy; they might seem simplistic in their attention to rhyme and the incredible short length of most of the poems (the majority of his poems hover around ten lines; many poets need that many lines as an on-ramp into a poem!). They are not simple. They are quite sexy.

Menashe is a poet with intense focus and attention to detail, even at the syllabic level. If you're talking ten lines, you bet the syllables matter. Many times they are doing double, sometimes triple duty in terms of meaning and sound. Subject matter is rangy and archetypal: grief, love, nature, the body, the body of community (especially noteworthy is Menashe's Old Testament references and his incorporation of Jewish heritage into the work).

And yet, the poems are so brief, they are like comets across the night sky: if you don't pay attention, you could miss them. And that is why the new book and the title of Neglected Master. In this age of hypertext and Spoken Word, the long narrative and Language poems, Menashe could seem quaint at first glance. But if a student of poetry wants to see a master craftsperson at work, Menashe is a good poet to read: the mind at work is readily perceived by the intelligent reader, the alliterative choices are so deft and so witty, and, sometimes, heart rendering that the level of craft is, simply, brilliant.

These are poems that have been beaten into existence just the same way a master blacksmith heats and beats metal into form. For example:

Adam Means Earth

I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what's in a name
To shame the one who knows
Mud does not stain
Clay he's made of
Dust Adam became-
The dust he was-
Was he his name

The sound of this poem is assured. 'Man' is echoed in reverse in 'name' and of course this rhymes directly with 'shame' and 'became', but there are slant rhymes, too, like 'whose' and 'knows' and 'shame' and 'stain' and 'made' and 'Adam.' The repetitions of 'was' and 'name' and 'dust' create rhythm. The alliterative and consonant control in these scant lines accrues to a powerful closing, and Menashe manages a deeply philosophic poem. He won't be neglected for long, and is a must read for those interested in the confluence of poetic 'ear' and meaning. Quite honestly, nobody is tighter than Menashe.