Door to a Noisy Room
Peter Waldor
Waldor’s spare irony—sometimes tender, sometimes bawdy—deals in dichotomies: love and hate, frailty and strength, fear and faith. These elliptical and colloquial lyrics draw equally from parable, prayer, and elegy. Hesitating on the threshold between isolation and community, the poet focuses a distortingly accurate microscope on what matters in our lives.
"...familial, humane, and loyal to the good people and the simple delights of this world."
—Publishers Weekly
"...The reader must learn to forfeit expectation and simply tune in, like listening to a koan...these poems generously reward the concentration their language demands. Waldor asks us to listen to the noisy world as he hears it, and he opens our ears."
—Boston Review
"What strange rooms and quirky music Waldor's poems open onto. His vision proves to us that the imaginal and the rational share equal claims on perception. The heart/mind of this work spiritualizes the material and materializes the soul."
—Li-Young Lee
"Door to a Noisy Room has the darkness, glitter, and hardness of obsidian. In this work, the heat of the passions has cooled to an elemental simplicity. Like obsidian the poems have been polished into jewels or napped to the keenest blade. They are beautiful and they are sharp."
—Lynn Emanuel
"It's such a delight when something catches you by surprise and makes you read on—and on. So it is with Waldor, a superb lyric, gnomic and gnostic poet. Poems like 'Sadder than Abraham' or 'Dancer' or 'Ebed Melech' are amazing."
—Gerald Stern
about the author
Peter Waldor’s poems have been published (or are forthcoming) in many magazines, such as The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Iowa Review. Waldor lives in northern New Jersey with his wife and three children, where he works in the insurance business.
Author photo by Ginny Twersky
two poems from door to a noisy room
electronic press kit (pdf file)
interview with peter waldor
