Robert Vivian is a poet of small places, writing from his home town in the dead center of Michigan with its small Big Boy restaurant and "tough-minded teenagers wearing their baseball caps hip-hop sideways, shoulder-dipping down the sidewalk." His second collection of Midwest-centered essays, The Least Cricket of Evening (a companion to 2002's Cold Snap as Yearning), contains short lyrical prose poem observations and meditations on the world around him: a college shortstop's suicide; a fresh road kill; a neighbor's house fire; his mom washing dishes; the local Chippewa casino filled with sad, cigarette-smoking old people amidst the "hypnotic drone of the slot machines, which sing of slow attrition and seepage and the occasional ding-ding-ding of quarter jackpots."
Vivian's vision isn't confined to the Midwest; he also reflects on harsh realities confronted in travels to Eastern Europe--places like Auschwitz, Krakow, Prague and Turkey, where people's "rubble worn and tea-stained" teeth remind him of the West's good fortune, where "you must be prepared for long talks with God that are strictly one way." Yet his heart and sensitivities remain in "the middle of Michigan, the slice of America with worker's comp on its mind." With a poet's eye and ear, Vivian elevates the everyday to the universal in a contemplative voice like "the least cricket of evening under the porch of a clapboard house, chirping out its one note of everlasting wisdom." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kans.