Usable Truths

Usable Truths

Irving Feldman writes with an immediacy, vigor, and precision of insight that make this book an exhilarating achievement. Again and again, one is brought to consider the claim of unwelcome doubts as well as unsolicited truths. His discipline and economy of phrase can survive comparison with the masters of the aphorism. – David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University

Aphorisms, shrewd observations, rules to live by and rules to resist—such are Irving Feldman’s usable truths. Some produce short, sharp shocks of recognition; others  need to be lingered over and lived with, unpacked like a line of metaphysical poetry. In each the fewest words enfold the fullest meaning. Like aphorists before him, Feldman looks at love and age and the way we live now, but he brings a poet’s touch to even his most philosophical insights. Usable Truths is thus what the French call a perfect livre de chevet, a book to keep on a bedside nightstand, ideal for those moments before sleep when we reflect on the strange turnings, the hits and misses, in our own lives. — Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The Washington Post and the author of several collections of essays, most recently Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.

‘Usable’ because these aphorisms invite us to trace—with mordant wit but also pity, and a strange courtesy—the secret life of our loves, hatreds, wonders, lies, and vanities, our forms of praise and styles of doubt, to trace their secret gifts and secret wounds, wherein we and others around us may gain and lose more than we think. They ask you to work on your creaturely listening. – Kenneth Gross, Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English, University of Rochester

Usable Truths is an aphoristic treasure chest. It invites the reader to reach in up to the elbows, certain to retrieve marvels of insight, satire, deflation of our vanities, celebration of our generosities, wordplay for the play’s sake, sentences built to please, provoke, press us into self-knowledge. – Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light, New York State Poet Laureate

In Usable Truths, Irving Feldman joins Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Blake, Emerson and a handful of other epigrammatists who alert us, with their laconic wit and wisdom, to the mansions that the mind can build in and from the smallest rooms of incisive thought. These nuggets contain a trove of riches. – Willard Spiegelman, Hughes Professor of English, emeritus, at Southern Methodist University

Reviews of Usable Truths

Buffalo News (27 November 2019)

What a rare figure Macarthur prize-winning poet Irving Feldman was in all the years he taught at the University at Buffalo. He came here in 1964, the same year as Leslie Fiedler. He retired in 2004 and continued writing brilliant awarded poetry. This collection of ‘Aphorisms and Observations’ is Feldman both unexpected and terrific. Anyone who ever talked with Feldman at any length at all knew there was a natural aphorist lurking slyly within. Even so, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted what he’d write here. For instance, ‘Art is from writing into the teeth of obsession. Successful artist is a failed bore. Successful bore is a failed artist.’ He likes communication with aphorists of yore and contradicting them smartly. He revises Karl Marx this way: ‘Tragedy repeated becomes farce. Farce repeated turns to disgust.’ How’s this line, reproduced in passing: ‘Al is so tough, he’s rotten with tough.’ (You’ve got to love ‘rotten with tough’ as a personal description.) … Feldman can’t help being both a gifted observer and gifted pedagogue. — Jeff Simon

Buffalo Spree (December 2019)

Irving Feldman is a MacArthur Prize-winning poet who has published eleven books of poetry, most of which are winners or finalists for prestigious awards. This book is not poetry, but those who know Feldman will enjoy it all the more, as it expresses Feldman the wit and raconteur, a man many in Buffalo and beyond know as a friend. The book is a series of observations, consisting — mostly — of one to three sentences. Some of the observations are gentle, some scathing, and many are quietly apt. It is unexpected, in the twenty-first century, to come upon a book of aphorisms; the surprise adds to the pleasure.