Vessels, my first book of poetry, was published on 17 December, 2024, by Unsolicited Press.
You can order it directly from my publisher, and everywhere else, too. For example, here:
(where, delightfully, they misspell my name with a capital “Van”) or here:
(where, curiously, they don’t misspell my name with a capital “Van”…)
Some Kind Words about the Book
A late addition to the great tradition of wisdom texts, Robert van Vliet’s Vessels attends to what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene, an era of climate destruction and dislocation from the natural world. “That is / the puzzle for / every generation,” he poses, “to / fix what has / been fixed.” The poet’s gentle, prophetic voice ekes out an intrepid authority, half-whispered into the ear as “water whispers to / the seed as it lies / on its belly,” and the poems function as both meditations and instructions for use. “Speak / carefully,” he instructs in one of the book’s many near-adages, “or the / listening fish will mistake / your confusion for their order.” Guided by gnostic and transcendentalist thought and built on found materials and chance operations, these poems walk a wooded path, where there is refuge, dissonance, ash, strange magic, and where below the observable world is the “unforeseen” territory of the spirit.
—Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract
In the author’s note at the end of Vessels, we are given the kindling for the conception of the book. A methodology of pre-fixed words, of random lines sourced from a small number of books, of boundaries, of casts of the dice. From those are skillfully & deliberately shaped the shortish poems found in each of the three separate parts of the book. But weaving their way through the book, across all the parts, are a series of longer poems, sermons almost, deeper, more impersonal than the shorter poems in the book. Yet those shorter poems are the feedstock from which the longer ones are recreated; & the longer poems are the stakes that the shorter poems grow stronger on. Vessels is a spiritual text, a canticle, but not necessarily a denominational one. A catechism in the sense it is an exposition of belief, where the mysteries of nature & relationships are the divinities. It is a communion with oneself, with others, with
the great beyond. It is a thoughtful & thought-provoking compendium of answers to those questions we needed someone more astute than ourselves to ask.
—Mark Young
About the Book
Vessels was written during a time of disquiet, isolation, and absences, when each day was folded over on itself, false and empty. To keep working, Robert van Vliet challenged himself to build a ten-line poem each day that needed to include five words and a line or fragment from a book, all chosen randomly through chance operations.
He knew that he was too swamped by the quotidian to allow himself to choose the words—they would be nothing but fear, mask, Covid, police, racist, murder, climate, rage… The chance operations allowed him to leave most of the decisions until the very moment he began composing.
The result is a collection of three suites, each seeking a path beyond the polarity of either willfully ignoring the appalling spectacle of those pandemic years or being angrily transfixed by it. Three paths out of mute heartbreak and toward a third space of hope, presence, spirit.
This Folded Path, my debut chapbook, was published in October, 2023, by above/ground press.
(I designed the cover and took the photograph, but then we forgot to mention that anywhere. So I’m mentioning it here.)
