Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Foreword Magazine

Chronogram

– , in Publishers Weekly, 2007/05/01

The refreshing humility of this prize-winning debut collection derives from the fact that the poems, which are well-crafted and full of small pleasures, often look outward first. They consider the details of the world and its stories—a small-town traveling fair, a doll house, Cain and Abel, a robin, a circumcision or Pandora’s Box—and encourage a reader to put together the larger meanings. This is not to say that Fried’s unassuming approach does not astonish: in a poem that begins with simple description (“In the lot by the volunteer fire house”), Fried manages a leap to a grander claim: “These are moments of slack, or wander,/ of full reversion to the old calm.” He is able to find “the jag and shimmer” of the most ordinary-seeming places and things. The moon was “once flawless and ample/ as a cufflink”; a kicking fetus “is building something/ in there” with “little saw strokes/ and two-handed hammer taps.” He even finds a new angle on Orpheus and Eurydice. Some poems are very quiet, but they find their solidity with insistent rhythms and subtle rhymes, with intelligent syntax, with “their soft mouths poised/ to part with their first consonantal sounds.

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– , in Foreword Magazine, 2007/06/01

Winner of the Kathryn Morton Prize in Poetry, Gabriel Fried works in New York City as a poetry editor. In this book, we encountered one of the year's most memorable debuts. At its best, poetry witnesses the ordinary world, and reveals what is awesome in it-so compellingly that we look again at the familiar. There's tenderness in that act, and Fried's elegant, lyrical poems achieve it with such success that they leave the reader hushed. In "Traveling Fair," Fried writes of "a small town's break from smallness" and its aftermath: "By the time / we wake tomorrow, the fair will have been razed, wax paper wrappers stranded in air / like trout when the creek goes dry in August. Then, for days, the sense of something / different." Hip, emerging poets can be susceptible to self-obsession, irony, and style so thick that it obscures substance. Instead, Fried dares to write with reverence. In the process, he restores a sense of connection to the natural world-and inquires into the antithesis of alienation: places of human belonging.

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– Caitlin McDonnell, in Chronogram, 2007/11/27

Rafting into the Afterlife


Poetic voice is often difficult to define. It can be playful, ironic, serious—what matters is that it’s distinctive. In an interview, poet Gabriel Fried explained that the poems in his Kathryn A. Morton Prize-winning debut collection Making the New Lamb Take lack irony because they were written, first and foremost, out of a longing to connect. The poems, which fuse images of a Hudson Valley upbringing with mythical and biblical references, feel as if they took a long time coming. The lines are as clean as filtered water, the subjects are quotidian life seen through the magnifying glass of an old soul. They have none of the sloppy experimentation or random “greatest hits” qualities common to first collections—although for poems that function largely to connect, their wires are often high above the ground.



As the editor of the poetry series at Persea Books, Fried has probably seen a lot of what not to do in poetry. Perhaps that is why his poems feel so flawless and chiseled to their poetic cores. Even the earthiest of experiences, a son’s circumcision, is elevated to the spirit world. Indeed, the scars of his “private self permeate his night like stars.” Some poems, like my favorite in the collection, “Noah’s Dove,” sandwich the ethereal between strong bites at the opening and close, so that we feel as if we are holding firmly onto something we can’t quite feel. It opens:



They rough you up,

Then move on. They have

Their orders, believe

in them, or need to

want to. I have seen this.



The poem continues as a series of declarative, abstract “I statements,” but it ends with the pleasingly brave “I have been man / handled and my mother / will never love me.” The punch would not surprise without the cautious precision that precedes it. In the end, Fried does make the connection he longs for; he just asks that the reader slow down and listen deeper than we might expect.

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