Notes to Self

"There is no / horizon, only leakage towards heaven," Eric Rensberger tells us in his astonishing Notes to Self: Selected Poems-a leak toward heaven Rensberger engages in a volume that captures his decades of poetic excavations. He digs deep into the soil of his everyday Indiana roots, where he grew up and has lived most of his life, giving us a body of work that breathes into the earth and through it with the wise eyes of someone who "knows" yet presents himself as just another "learner." He tells us, self-depracatingly, "Five buzzards on the lawn, all related to me"; yet we know his heart, one that embraces the missteps of our lives as a gift: "the mistakes in music / are not shameful / they are another music coming in." Some mistakes enter through trusting language: "it was strange but / I was stranger / I meant to say strong but strange will do." With such generative slippages, Rensberger displays a kinship with poets who embrace the world's fluidity as a form of redemption. His brand of "regionalism" is never narrow but springs from the particular, moving beyond mere geography into insights that are wide-ranging. What he discovers is a selfless self that seeks understanding through a practice of deep attentiveness to the world- and how the outer world connects to the inner. As he tells us in "Summit": after i cut / the apple / i had to / treat both / halves fairly." Rensberger's poems "cut" into his own heart and into the heart of the world simultaneously, seeking balance. It is a cutting that is always preparing itself to heal. In "Poem of Water," his goals are clear, tender, and beautiful: "I want to be a different kind of water / in a bed of horizons with other waters." Here is a poet who speaks to and from our most secret selves. Notes to Self is a remarkable achievement, a book I will return to again and again-a book we all need, whether or not we know it!

-George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana

"Picture a broad oak tree deep in a small forest surrounded by farmland, or a silvery sycamore over decades leaning into the meander of a creek just out of sight of the highway. This is where Eric Rensberger so often finds his poems: in the misty mystic remnants of wilderness, where wistful longing, quiet revelations, and generous friendship form a foundation as solid as a stack of river rock. Maybe it once held up the corner of a shed but now, encountered later, it could be a forgotten altar or a massage to the future or just a random pile assembled by stoned hikers. Something once happened here. Viewed from a distance, Notes to Self is selected from Eric Rensberger's vast storehouse of poems penned over many decades. In that sense it sprawls and overhangs like vines. Up close, each on its own is a tender dip into the rich, singular life and peculiar vision of a poet with a deceptively simple, effortlessly sharp, and patiently dedicated process of taking time to observe, reflect, and write."

- Tony Brewer, 2024 Indiana Literary Champion, author of Water Witch