CODES, PRECEPTS, BIASES, AND TABOOS
Poems 1973-1993
Lawrence Joseph
FROM FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
"Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together
the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry:
Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes.
Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as
the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging
poets."
PRAISE FOR BEFORE OUR EYES
"In a feast of opposites and tangents, the sensual, the
intellectual, the visual ... the political ... come together in
Joseph's poems to create a voice both rich and intelligent.
His luminous revelations remind us that this is the stuff for which
we turn to poetry in the first place ... Before Our Eyes takes us
to new territories of sensory truth and observation."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The third collection of poems by an increasingly important
talent. Joseph's unique sensibility is a distillation of two
very different perceptions of language. As an attorney,
he is intimate with words as expressions or cultural values and
laws. As a poet, he is enraptured by the resonate beauty of
simple language and its ability to convey such revelations as the
promise of light, the aptness of a gesture, or the odd
juxtapositions of daily life. This seesawing between
the cerebral and the emotional, the political and the sensual,
gives Joseph's poems their potency. But that's not the only
key to his work. Joseph's experiences as a Lebanese-American
underlie each of his poems about urban violence, international
finance, war, and the global epidemic of 'soul sickness.'
Joseph is shrewd and informed, romantic and inspired, writing about
the world as we know it ..." --Donna Seaman,
Booklist
"History, personal and global, a sense of place, and any kind of
sequential or moral order, break into isolated images which fly
outward without quite disappearing, without losing their crispness
as singular elements. Many passages attempt to render
accurately a moment of perception simply by being faithful to the
diffuseness of its particularities, and to the distortions inherent
in the very act of perception. The poems transfer feeling
as feeling directly to the page. Their images
generate at once great velocity and a kind of freeze-frame
effect. Such immediacy feels revolutionary. Reading
Before Our Eyes is challenging and jolting. The
poet's submission to struggle, contradictory as this sounds,
becomes a kind of beacon -- an example. For this poet,
bravery is a way of being. He identifies what seems most
difficult to utter, given the times in which we live, and in his
own way finds the words, the images, the cadences, to utter
it." --Leslie Ullman, The Kenyon Review
"As Joseph makes clear, the way we think is also a product of
our culture, a special construct almost as solidly built as any
machine off the assembly line in Detroit. Before Our Eyes
is an amalgam, a fusion of time and place and sensory
perception, held together by its central sensibility and welded
into place by its own 'lighting syntax.' Joseph manages to
pull off the difficult featof creating an antilogic, a
place where the poem presides over its intricate synesthesia ...
The inner world of these poems is an invention, yes, but, like all
good inventions, its innovations begin to feel imperative.
Actually, it seems as if Joseph has understood all the connections
in advance; his method is a kind of controlled surrealism ... But
rather than revealing the irrational, Before Our Eyes is,
in spite of itself, a book of ideas. Joseph has clearly
mastered the ability 'to remember and imagine at the same
time.' His 'act of the mind' shows us what will 'suffice' can
be complicated; in Before Our Eyes, it is a blend of
Williams' multifacted America with Stevens' rich interior
world." -- Judith Kitchen, TheGeorgia
Review
"In Before Our Eyes, Joseph tests the limits of emotion
and relects on a morality of feeling and seeing. Perception
is practiced, 'made' and 'felt,' particularly perception that would
seek out the neglected, the excluded, and the hidden.
Joseph's poems practice direct sensory observation in a
technological culture in which sensory materials are framed,
reframed, and programmed. Yet while Joseph's is a painterly
sensibility focusing on shape and color, line and contour, his
clouds and sunsets are cut through with urban facts ... At the same
time, he is deeply protective of an inner life. It is out of
his sense of the durable privacy of sensibility that Joseph defines
poetry as 'the act of forming / imagined language resisting
humiliation.'" --Lee Upton, Northwest Review
"... [A] brilliant collection that casts light on the
relationships between speech and language, power and law, the
individual and the state. Joseph's range of reference is
vast, including theological formulations drawn from Aquinas and
Ignatius, as well as more popular musical sources from his native
Motown, and rich thematic connections between Rousseau and Saussare
-- all of which introduce subtle biographical and philosophical
nuances ... As a child born into Arab-American shopkeeping culture,
Joseph redirects cultural and political sign systems through an
'open heart' now written into his own compelling poetry."
--Kenneth Warren, American Book Review
"Beyond his style, it's Joseph's unflagging powers of reflection
that linger. Though frequently like a French
moraliste peering from the vantage point of a cafe table,
Jospeh never settles for an armchair sensibility. His poetry
works along the front lines, reconnoitering and marking down the
slightest shocks and snarls of urban and international life, resist
flinching or turning away, they deserve our attention. If
what they say about that world comes from a place of vigilence or
concern ... they have earned our admiration. In Before Our
Eyes, Jospeh negotiates the finer points of our linguistic and
social contracts ... For this, he and his collection are to be
praised." --David Yezzi, Parnassus
"Before Our Eyes makes the tension between beauty and
terror, lyric language and historical fact, aesthetics and
politics, its central subject and major burden ... Visually
opulent, Joseph's poems employ a dazzling array of color words ...
The result is a poetry by turns engrossing and exhausting, charged
with anxious introspection yet still transfixed by flashes of
beauty. --Roger Gilbert, Michigan Quarterly
Review
The rift between our public and private realms is where Joseph
strives ... a mind at work -- at home with inconsistencies and wary
of conclusions ... idiosyncratic, off-kilter pieces, yet no less
observant for being so ..." --Albert Mobilio, Voice
Literary Supplement
"His juxtaposition and examinations of language are often
dazzling, often beautiful. Joseph raises the right issues and
shows us how to be morally instructed by the sensual world we see
before our eyes ..." --Nancy Schoenberger, Verse
"Joseph grew up in Detroit, a child of the Lebanese and Syrian
community there. His family had a small grocery store in a
neighborhood that went up in flames in the 1967 riot. With
stints in its factories, he attended the universities of Michigan
and Cambridge, and the University of Michigan Law School. He
now lives in New York City ... His is an aesthetic of inner and
outer, public and private, physical fact and abstract speculation,
a melding of opposites appropriate for a poet who embodies many of
the contradictions of American society today ... Joseph celebrates
the city and the kaleidoscope of images it thrusts on us ...
In the midst of sometimes lunatic fullness, and against all odds,
he also celebrates the possibility of love." --Regan Upshaw,
Multicultural Review
"Acutely consious of the passing scene, in his immediate New
York City and in the world, Joseph offers poems of abrupt
juxtapositions and sheer dizzying variety, products of a poet who
truly believes that 'By written I mean made, by made mean
felt.'" --Laurie Greer, Virginia Quarterly
Review
"Now comes Lawrence Joseph, a professor of law at St. John's
University School of Law in New York, who, with greater effect than
any of his contemporaries, is carrying on the tradition of other
poets who were also lawyers, such as Wallace Stevens, Charles
Reznikoff, and Edgar Lee Masters ..." --Elizabeth Cohen,
The New York Times
"A beautiful book. The poems are so good they made me
hurt down to the roots of my hair. This book is going
to be a classic. Reading the poems, the way one sets u the
other -- the total impact, each poem separately, the whole
experience -- is a challenge and an exquisite thrill. I'm
going to tell everyone I know about it." --Thom Jones
PRAISE FOR CURRICULUM VITAE
"Outstanding ... A poet of fierce intensity ... In the age of
the universal writing workshop, Joseph writes with an authenticity
that is earned, not just acquired." --David Lehman, The
Washington Post Book World
"Lawrence Joseph is the poet as secret agent, prowling for
incongruities. With rare nerve and intelligence, he brings
together everything -- from the financial markets to his family
history -- always with a finally balanced sense of form and moral
consciousness. Strong stuff!" -- Stuart Klawans, "Fresh
Air," National Public Radio
"Joseph's achievement goes beyond color and detail..
Curriculum Vitae has an ironic, restless intelligence that
keeps it right on the cusp of wisdom ... There's also an
exhilaration in the speed of his associations ... With a graceful
touch and virtuoso timing ... he constructs cubist panoramas in
pitch-perfect free verse that never betrays his commitment to the
mode ..." --Matthew Flamm, The Village Voice
"Curriculum Vitae argues without resolution, without
the escapism of false sentimentality, nostalgia, or
self-indulgence. It confronts the violence of both psyche and
polis while seeking not the balance of reason, but rather, the
effort of conscience ... This is a ... writer who can bring drama
to his passions. Let's have some more." --Paul
McDonough, American Book Review
"Lawrence Joseph's language of transaction and law (he is a
professor of law at St. John's University School of Law) is
compelling as an invocation of systems of power. National
debt and a client on hold may coexist with notes on poverty and
sudden thrusts of sensuality. Animosities are leavened with
beauty ... The specificity of events intrigues him ... His
sensibility registers the accumulative trauma of knowledge and
event ... Yet the shifts in register and ostensible subject do not
seem arbitrary. Instead they open a sphere in which rapid
juxtapositions reflect much of present experience." --Lee
Upton, Northwest Review
"His poems engage us immediately ... Their dominant mode ...
is kind of gritty, straightforward confessionalism in which a
relaxed, conversational tone is intensified by its bizarre,
violent, and poignant topics ... His vision cuts inward and outward
with equal ferocity ... His candor and dispassionate moral insights
draw us to him ..." --Henry Hart, Michigan Quarterly
Review
"His is a tragic sense that perceives and expresses human sorrow
as well as struggling human hope ... Joseph's work is what poetry
should be: the human spirit pitted against what is unacceptable but
which nonetheless is." --Samuel Hazo, The Pittsburgh
Press
"Lawrence Joseph's poems have the poignant exactitude that only
real poetry has. His words carry a great responsibility and
strength, so rare in our time." --Yehuda Amichai
"A lively, fastidious, cosmopolitan talker, Lawrence Joseph
takes on the ... realities of his world and ours in poems that
pulse with conviction." --James Merrill
"The diction and rhetoric of economics, law, commerce, and
religion intermingle in Curriculum Vitae to convey the
array and disarray, the patter and pattern of this historical
moment in America. Lawrence Joseph's poems are dynamic,
written with acuity about the relationship of power, work, and
money, illuminating States too complex and separate to be called
United. Joseph understands that there is no self-implication
without self-revelation: these are poes of unremitting passion,
dexterous language, and bristling intelligence in which the
personal proceeds with the political toward conclusions both
surprising and unavoidable. Social engagement is transfused
with imagination; the tone is at once tough-minded and
compassionate; gritty exposition invigorates prayerful
lyricism. The inclusiveness of vision amounts to a
moral stance. Unlike poets who excise unpleasantness in favor
or unfathomable, the untenable, the strange, the sad, and chooses
to look long rather than look away. 'My power becomes my
sorrow,' Joseph writes. The reverse is often true."
--Alice Fulton
PRAISE FOR SHOUTING AT NO ONE
"Exceptional ... An extremely impressive poetic debut."
--David Lehman, Newsday and The Philadelphia
Inquirer
"Shouting at No One offers reminders of what we choose to ignore
and the poet cannot forget. Joseph's poems cut to the quick;
they never dignify violence or try to explain it away. They
gleam with the sharp edge of their truth; they are hard to
forget." --James Finn Cotter, The Hudson
Review
"A passionate, ambitious, strangely beautiful book ... poems
[which] certainly deserve to be anthologized, and widely taught and
read." --Richard Daniels, The Minnesota Review
"Joseph does not need dramatics: his ear for dialogue, eye for
detail, and direct voice are immediately arresting ... These poems
shine with gritty truths gleaned from hard reality." --Joseph
Parisi, Booklist