True Faith

“I think I want everyone and everything to be loved so much/ I get dour,” Sadoff writes in his eighth collection. Sadoff sees himself and others with acute awareness, probing at the world’s imperfections until he reaches something spiritual he calls “the jumble of syllables we utter when we approach the unsayable.” Pushing the reader to a white-hot place, he explores “our fevers, those hungers/ that have no words around them, no illustrations.” We cannot construe ourselves, and yet want others to try to explain us. With wry humor, Sadoff states, “decipher me, we say to the wilderness./ Perhaps we need our own private radios./ If so, I’d be a station with too much static.” There is palpable frustration in Sadoff’s poems, but also pleasure in being human and being scarred by things like “soured love affairs.” These mistakes and lost loves, he argues, are what make us more than humans. In his poem, “To the Gods” he writes, “If I could sing I’d want to distill the thrill/ of her, and more I’d want that lilting playful voice/ to stay with me, all the sing-song iambs/ that forestall the crash of loving/ too much, hanging on too long.” Sadoff laments the gods aren’t listening, but he finds gods everywhere. (Apr.)