- Ned Balbo
Reviews
In his extraordinary and compelling debut volume Galileo's Banquet, Ned Balbo investigates a cosmology of human
aspirations that is deeply intimate and openly public. Wherever Ned Balbo trains his lens, we discover a poetry that
is both historically wise and psychologically complex. His supremely lyrical narrative pulsars will be with us, I'm
confident, for many, many years to come.
—David St. John
Ned Balbo's first book, Galileo's Banquet, is about what can be seen, known, and trusted, and what cannot. The
seeing involved is both celestial and earthly, as the poet comes to terms with his own secret adoption and the
painful revelations that follow years later. In an age that prizes unchecked confessionalism, Balbo handles heavily
freighted emotional issues with clear-headed restraint and a beautiful formal control. His poems demonstrate that, in
a world of imperfect and broken human relationships, the very act of writing poetry is a form of consolation,of
healing.
—Elizabeth Spires
Ned Balbo's Galileo's Banquet marks the elegant debut of a writer whose poems link the history of the galaxy to a
family burdened with secrets. His images and his mastery of meter and form will take your breath away.
—Nancy Willard
Ned Balbo
Ned Balbo grew up on Long Island, New York and holds degrees from Vassar College, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he has published poems in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, The Formalist, The Quarterly, Santa Barbara Review and elsewhere; he is the recipient of a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and winner of The Lyric’s quarterly and Virginia prizes. His work includes the narration text for the Miramax release Microcosmos, as well as reviews for art journal and Verse. He teaches at Loyola College in Baltimore and works as an academic dean for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
Poems from Galileo's Banquet
FIRST DAYS IN A WORLD
For Caroline
Like hearing parents, some deaf parents
also expect to have child who is the same
as themselves...[But] how is it possible
that parent and child from two such different
worlds can meet?
--Paul Preston, Mother Father Deaf
Right now, of everything that's visible
And yet means nothing, this shy man, your father
Deaf since birth, who's watched you for an hour
May be most important. He's been told
His twin daughters, weeks premature, can hear,
But can't believe it yet, not till he sees
Some sign in your response beyond the glass
Dividing him from you. He taps the window,
Sensing its vibration; taps again,
And all the babies twitch. How small your hands
Are, flexing while your sister cries; and now
He knows--elated, saddened--Time to go,
The nurse touches his arm, and so he does,
Though when he finds your mother still asleep,
He'll have nowhere to go except the lobby
Or outside, to smoke....For you, whose newborn
Hands, short-fingered, dense with lines, close now
And fall down at your side, the world is what
Rocks you within its hum, all cries except
Your own drowned out, a bright machinery
That warms you in its shell. You want so much
Just to be held these first days in a world
More like his than you'll ever know again.
Discovery
Before the Challenger memorial service, September 1988
First flight after disaster. Nothing moves
Except with grace, weightless beyond the glass,
Across a blue, bright ocean. Earth persists,
Its white clouds luminous, while here in space,
Unfastened, you turn slowly, heels to head,
Clipboard in hand, reading. What will you say?
Dear friends, your loss has freed us to begin
Anew with confidence...No, that’s not right.
Lost moon and rubble, everything that moves,
All dangers no one can anticipate,
Dead still and silent stars so far away
That to behold them is to mourn their loss,
What’s missing these last hours before the broadcast?
You weren’t the first, and you won’t be the last.
