“Embrace is about the fundamental human need for love, a big, risky subject handled with admirable poise. Poignant and thoughtful, witty and intense, these poems hold the reader in a verbal embrace and don't let go.”
Alan Shapiro, Tantalus in Love

“With Embrace, Bruce Lader invokes a spirit of love poetry found in Petrarch, Philip Sidney, and even Elizabeth Browning. Yet he also brings a deep sense of the contemporary, his intimate images and references effectively placing the timelessness of romantic love within modern contexts. His language is rich with description and melody, passion and humor, wisdom and celebration. This is a delightful collection.”
John Amen, Pedestal Magazine

“An erotic, sensual undercurrent runs through the poems in Bruce Lader’s most recent collection. Whether he’s describing an intimate moment, a quarrel, or the rich, musical qualities of a relationship, the work is strong yet subtle. Ultimately, as in: 'White Roses,' the tone of these selections sounds predominantly hopeful: Around midnight, feel free/to pull a white rose from the vase/on the coffee table, loosen a palmful/of petals and throw them like/Times Square confetti over the friends/wanting snow.”
Leah Browning, Apple Valley Review

      The word that overhangs Bruce Lader’s Embrace is “abundance.” The word itself is repeated only a couple times in the collection, but each poem speaks to the plenty in the lives of its featured couple. There’s a profusion of life—vegetation in the garden, bees at flower buds, birds at the feeder, the vivacity of the couple’s romance. Sex and the garden come together—with all the life they entail.

after her shower           in the mazy
         knowledge
     garden

a pulse          phosphorescent
                               as foxfire
plus the whim
                           of exuberance in her eyes

equal a heaven you can touch.

      “Heaven” is a key word here. One can nearly say that all is right with the world as it is rendered in this book. Embrace is composed of mostly pretty things—flowers, dance, warmth, and clouds. Although there are moments of tension, the desperate seems far from this work. Instead, in poems like “Little Spring Song,” we “gather violets, buttercups, lupines.” And “we breathe wild yellow jasmine/ festooning mulberry branches.” We are lured into raspberry fields, with moist clover at our feet and warming sunlight above our heads.

      Lader makes it easy to dwell in his work. This is a book for those who want to inhabit a lovely space for 32 pages. It’s a feel-good read. Its situations and themes are repeated, creating a closed system, a sheltered paradise.

      As is clear from the book’s cover, which features a man and woman sculpted in an embrace, the collection is of love poetry. Lader speaks of his own love life—capturing the sex and companionship he shares with his wife. He also occasionally writes love letters; addressing tenderly the “you” he references in poems like the sensual “3:00 A.M. Dinner”:

We went over every mouth-watering item on the menu,
      you know the bill of fare I have in mind,
all of them were tempting,
none of them would keep.
So I got up, prepared your favorite hors d’oeuvre,
      you know the saucy one that was,
it only urged on our appetite,
so we mixed together an entrée
      (and juicy sides of other things)

      The poet spends much of his page time admiring his wife, marveling at her tireless activity in the garden. That she might see the fruits of her labor and find her pleasure, Lader addresses the birds:

A woman who loves to serve you every day
wants you to be merry.
Feel free to lark in the water
from rain-barrels. Visit her homemade
suet buffet as often as you like,

swoop to her gazebo in the garden
where at dawn with book, tea, and candles,
she welcomes your entertaining therapy.

      Most of the scenes that Lader describes are Edenic. In his wife’s garden, man, woman, bird, insect, and beast can cohabitate harmoniously, without violence. There are few consequential disruptions to this bliss in the book. In “Zero,” a cold snap sneaks in, and quarrels and lies emerge. But this crisis point is only a couple poems long. The book’s denouement restores peace to the household.

      To offer others this marital contentment, Lader offers six tips in “How to Bring a Marriage Good Luck.” Each reads like a spell: “Remember to feed the cat or dog/ out of an old shoe/ and you will find a pot of gold.” The unlikely outcomes of Lader’s suggested combinations would have one believe that there’s an element of magic to sustaining a relationship. Lader is quick to call attention to the fact that his list of six points is not comprehensive. “The rest is missing,” he writes.

      There’s no doubt that Lader wishes goodness on us all. In “White Roses,” he writes the following imperatives, as if spoken by the host of a New Year’s Eve potluck:

Toss feathery petals on the friend
whose feisty cat lost a leg. Share
weightless words about friends
drifted away, sprinkle fields of renewal
for the starving, war’s dispossessed.
These wishes also work at other
gatherings. The petals needn’t be white.

      Here, Lader seems to wave the victims of starvation and war off with a blessing. These poems have no room for global matters of distress. The collection centers firmly on kind matters of the heart. Lader would have it that “presidents and generals/ abandon their wars/ so they can salute/ [his wife’s] expanding garden.” The book rests on the premise that what matters between two people can matter to a readership. Lader hypothesizes that there are relationships worth noticing and that his is one. He writes in a long tradition of poets who have eulogized their own amorous partnerships. The poems record well an apparently functional, present-day relationship. It can catapult readers into a heavenly space. Readers who allow themselves to be ushered into such a milieu will respond with delight.

~ The Pedestal Magazine