Passing through a Gate: Poems, Essays, and Translations

by John Balaban

An essential collection of poetry and prose from an award-winning poet who faced some of the greatest dramas of his time in American history.John Balaban is an extraordinary writer and storyteller whose prize-winning poetry and prose are informed by a love of languages, deep scholarship, hard travel, and a willingness to confront the violence and sufferings of the world. In this essential collection of his work, the best of his prize-winning poems since 1970 are collected in one place, threaded through with essays that link poetry to Balaban’s extensive travels, whether hitchhiking throughout the United States or wandering the countryside of Vietnam—during wartime—to record and translate folk poetry. 

The result is a remarkable story about a life in poetry. Empathetic, truth-telling, and fiercely perceptive, Passing through a Gate is a literary tour de force. As Maxine Kumin reminds us, “Balaban seems to me our moral spokesperson, our lyricist, our polemicist, exhorter, and in short, the poet we need.”

252 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 28, 2024

About the author

John Balaban (b. 1943) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. He has won several awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a National Poetry Series Selection, and, forLocusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems, the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He was named the 2001–2004 National Artist for the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also been nominated twice for the National Book Award. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Balaban translates Vietnamese poetry; he is also a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Balaban is a poet-in-residence and English professor in the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

But what can poets do about the missing words, gone
even from those lips that longed to say them—like wishes
floating off above the river, like coins
tossed from barges, bridges, bateaux mouches?

Where else is this happening? Is it happening at home?
In a world reduced to billboards, he would be totally unnerved.
The strangely exiled poet has been drinking for ten days
but this has only sharpened his worry about the words...

from George Borisov in Paris

John Balaban, in this tender poem about an aging Bulgarian poet published in his 2006 collection Path, Crooked Path, touches prophetically on the worry so many of us who adore words, who write, create, publish, rinse, repeat, fret ever more about. It's not just billboards anymore: the world seems reduced to a thin, postcard-sized implement we are never more than inches from, from which emanates the urgencies, exigencies and shouts of the world over, leaving little room for words that heal. Words that matter.

I want you to know the worst and be free from it
I want you to know the worst and still find good.
Day by day, as you play nearby or laugh
with the ladies at Peoples Bank as we go around town
and I find myself beaming like a fool,
I suspect I am here less for your protection
than you are here for mine, as if you were sent
to call me back into our helpless tribe.

from Words for My Daughter

In this exquisite collection of some of his most resonant poetry, essays and translations, John Balaban reminds us why words matter, and why we should stop and rest awhile with words, why we should listen to the gods.

Balaban was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, but he rejected his student deferment and travelled to Vietnam in the late 60s with the International Volunteer Services to teach at Can Tho University. He was injured during the Tet Offensive, but returned to Vietnam to care for war-injured children and later, to record and translate ca dao, a Vietnamese oral poetic form.

A tiny bird with red feathers,
a tiny bird with black beak
drinks up the lotus pond day by day.
Perhaps I must leave you.

Passing Through a Gate invites the reader to pass through a threshold into the nourishing, poignant, sensual world of Balaban's poetry and the grounded, delightful humanity of his essays—from the time he and his wife, freshly landed from Vietnam and only in their twenties, hosted Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and their entourage during Fonda and Hayden's anti-war tour, to getting terrifyingly lost in the desert of New Mexico — Balaban as an old man who simply thought to take an early morning walk around the landscape where he was alone, working on a book.

The poetry takes us from New Mexico to Vietnam, the Pacific Northwest to Greece, and to his parents' home country of Romania. Along the way, Balaban hitchhikes across America, an eternal restlessness stirring the poet's soul. His work is deeply rooted in landscape, his language as clear and refreshing as a mountain stream.

There is a timelessness about Balaban's work that makes these poems easy and necessary to return to again and again- my copy is dog-eared with the many that caught my breath and my heart. This is a necessary collection of a beloved poet.


N.B. Although I am a staff member of Copper Canyon Press —this book's publisher—any and all comments are strictly my own.

[John Balaban · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a bit odd to write a review of my own book, so here below is the Barnes and Noble review for my Passing Through a Gate:

"An essential collection of poetry and prose from an award-winning poet who faced some of the greatest dramas of his time in American history. John Balaban is an extraordinary writer and storyteller whose prize-winning poetry and prose are informed by a love of languages, deep scholarship, hard travel, and a willingness to confront the violence and sufferings of the world. In this essential collection of his work, the best of his prize-winning poems since 1970 are collected in one place, threaded through with essays that link poetry to Balaban’s extensive travels, whether hitchhiking throughout the United States or wandering the countryside of Vietnam—during wartime—to record and translate folk poetry.

The result is a remarkable story about a life in poetry. Empathetic, truth-telling, and fiercely perceptive, Passing through a Gate is a literary tour de force. As Maxine Kumin reminds us, “Balaban seems to me our moral spokesperson, our lyricist, our polemicist, exhorter, and consoler: in short, the poet we need.”

Hope you like it. -JB