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Beginning at the Left is a quietly searing meditation on language, memory, and the fractured beauty of human experience. In this deeply reflective collection, Peter Siedlecki traces the subtle transformations of identity through the tools we use to shape it, words, rituals, artifacts, and dreams. From childhood recollections and familial grief to the surreal echoes of historical conscience, Siedlecki’s poems inhabit a world where meaning is always just beyond reach, and yet urgently pursued.
With wit, precision, and philosophical grace, Siedlecki explores how we inherit our voices, how language both reveals and fails us, and how the past, personal and collective, clings to the corners of our perception. A single floating leaf, a misfiring sound system, a rusted bag of old sporting gear: each detail becomes a metaphor for the distances we traverse to understand ourselves and each other.
This is a book of unflinching insight and quiet wonder, where the personal becomes political, and the poetic becomes a lens for survival. Beginning at the Left is both elegy and inquiry, an invitation to look again, to listen harder, and to speak with renewed intention.
Peter Siedlecki’s new book Beginning at the Left captures myriad wonders in topics ranging from nature to religion, mortality, and consciousness: “The way honey softens the edge of bitter tea…conceals the hints of tragedy in our gaudy pageant.” Readers observe the poetic tradition in a spider hanging in the shower, speak to the deceased through an old box score, behold a single leaf or an entire civilization.
From biopsied skin cells to a population facing the wrath of pandemic, each poem begins in contemplation and marvels at the bright light of language and its infinite discoveries.
—Jennifer Campbell, English Professor and author of What Came First
Peter Siedlecki, gives us snapshots of life in the best of the best language he knows, Poetry. These poems show us what “gives Death its sadness.” The relevance of words, and the significant lack thereof beautifully shine through. This book is a moving account of one’s being alive in the world, if only temporarily. I loved it!
—Carole Southwood
“Cockeyed worlds/that reveal the horror/of the one we know”: thus Peter Siedlecki captures a valedictory for his dedicated lifetime of building “verbal structures/that have some sense to them.” Peter listened to the world we know cry out to him to tell it as it is, not as he wished it to be, so his cockeyed worlds bring us sense we did not know we could know.
—David Landrey
“Peter Siedlecki does not shy away from ‘deep thoughts’, though he wisely steers clear of murky abstractions and ‘let-me-impress-you’ arcana. His voice sounds profoundly puzzled and disturbed by the darker aspects of the human condition, yet its somber Heraclitean tone is tempered by the laconic and slyly witty inclusion of odd particulars. He understands that suspicions of smugness are disarmed not by what you say, but by how you put it.
So, the title poem, ‘Beginning at the Left’ (what a finely multivalent title!) confronts the hopeless task of using language to free the mind from the chaotic and constantly shifting web of possibilities in which language itself encases that mind, and then deftly slips into goofy and even trivial language samples—a radio announcer nailing a Mickey Mantle homerun hit, a country-and-western lyric, the memory of a dead uncle’s silly jingle. In their very irrelevance these seem to get closer to ‘truth’ than any lofty generalities. The poem concludes by imagining Mount Rushmore’s Jefferson survey with stony eye a vast American panorama of dubiously patriotic ‘meaning’. The effect of this kind of gear shift is both sobering and somehow hilarious.
Most of the longer poems in this collection show this kind of inventiveness. But some of the shorter ones pack even greater pleasure in their close and affectionate observation of ordinary and usually domestic events: cleaning up deadwood clutter at a summer cabin (‘This Tree’), watching a dry leaf spin in a chilly early spring breeze (Float’), or--a favorite of mine-- ‘Walking the Dog’.
Best of all, two love-in-old-age lyrics (‘December’ and ‘Today’s Love Poem’) will melt your heart, if you’re not too young, with their uncanny blend of disillusion, grateful affection, vulnerability, thoughtfulness, rue, and quiet hope.”
--Max Wickert
Peter Siedlecki is Professor Emeritus of English and Poet in Residence at Daemen College. He has coordinated the Readings at the RIC poetry series. He is a former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Daemen and Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Literature at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. He is the current director of the Catherine Burchfield Parker Artist Salon. In the early 1970’s he was part of a folk singing group called The Circle that also included Mary Ellen Matta, Tom Dose and Jim Chase and performed at various colleges and coffee houses. He presently sings with The St. Joseph University Church choir and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus. He is a former member of Freudig Singers of Western New York. He has studied voice with the internationally acclaimed soprano, Cristen Gregory. His previous collections of poetry are Voyeur (2006), Going With The Flow (2015), Le Trouvere Pretendu (2019), and Via Crucis, featuring art by Catherine Burchfield Parker (2024).
Book Information:
· Paperback: 74 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-512-0
$18
