One day,
I will become visible again.
(“I Have Important Things To Do”)
​
In Alan Toltzis’s collection, The Book Of Questions, the deep questions are drawn from the continuity between life and death in one’s consciousness, and between present and future. His poems depict the connection to family, friends and neighbors, while looking askance--thinking about the hyacinths that won’t bloom yet being still deep in winter. They contemplate the daily encounters with insects like bees, lightning bugs and a cockroach upending itself into a crevice and one thinking,
​
In this or some unearthly
world to come, what
but hinged reflexes,
like a carapace connected by love and purpose
—spreading, flexing—
can deliver me,
scurrying soulless to the other side of night?
​
The deep dives are never too weighty, are balanced with wry touches, a light touch, like the self-admission of being ineffectual, and a leaning toward Keatsian negative capability. His poems traverse the visible and the invisible--metaphors of port wine stains and moles segue into lifemarks, the insidious
“slight
that festers into grudge; deep aches
that scar vulnerable heart to stone.”
The surface of life itself is seen as a portal into the unknown; the ordinary becomes an “unordinary place”. So in the end what sort of closure there is lies only in a question mark, as one asks, “What can and cannot ever be known?”
​
Irene Toh
