Wherever I Look I’m Never There

(Poems, by Allen Brafman, Rain Mountain Press, 2020)

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I must begin by claiming Allen Brafman, author of the recently released Wherever I Look I Am Never There, as my Rain Mountain Press brother and stablemate. This means I’m not objective. But who is ever objective when writing about a book they cherish and adore for its nerve and strength in reaching for the hard-to-get-at, confounding, vexing, astonishing truths Brafman’s book engages thus. In Wherever I Look I Am Never There, the poet brings a clean tenderness to the piecing together of the gathered components of a world that opens and hides, a world that radiates, recedes, hides and gets born over and over again.

Wherever I Look I Am Never There is a thrill to read, first time around. It has an accessibility, a gentleness, a music that even an inexperienced reader of verse can get behind. However it is the way the book crept up on me after I read it, summoning me back, that leads me to wish to share more about it.

I love the title poem, upon which the book hangs and to which it points. It may be that the “I” is “never there” because, in gentleness, the speaker recognizes the need to push “I” away. The not being there (or the not being visible) may be one of the secrets to the book’s/ poems’ success.

As a boy I had been taught