A Forest In His Pocket by Ray Cicetti

A Forest in His Pocket by Ray Cicetti is a brilliant debut book from an outstanding poet.  Through the poems in this collection, Cicetti invites readers to join him as he shares a narrative of spiritual discernment and growth. Informed by Zen teachings, filled with love, and focused on ultimate happiness, these poems are verified by personal experience and passed from poet to reader just as Zen teachings are passed from master to disciple. These are poems of people, place, and self-realization, powered by elegance and touches of humor. Each poem is rich in imagery, skillfully compressed, and superbly crafted. Buddha is quoted as saying,” It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It can not be taken from you.” In these poems, the victory belongs to Ray Cicetti, but victory is not only his. It is a shared gift that the poet offers to anyone who joins him in seeing deeply.

–Adele Kenny, Founding Director, Carriage House Poetry Series

Ray Cicetti’s poetry is a revelation that will smack you in the head. It takes me back to talking with him in New Jersey diners nearly forty years ago, except that the paisan Catholic schoolboy from North Newark now tells the truth with even more blunt power, and his Zen teaching has grown from an instruction into a habitation. These poems integrate Cicetti’s twin personae with style and grace, frequently peppered with hilarity. Read him!

–Daniel Born, author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel, and former vice president at the Great Books Foundation

The poems in A Forest in His Pocket offer what I need to keep moving forward: the comfort of intimacy, the dexterity of grace, and that special light of unknowing that gives us all both pause and courage. Cicetti’s narratives encompass what is both deeply rooted in the physical world and in our shimmering percepts of unknowing—and it’s the brilliant flickering between those two that give these poems their humor, their gravitas, their delicious tensions and resonance. Cicetti’s prose poem, “How the Universe Began,” is the creation story I choose to believe above all others: “It did not begin with the Big Bang or random molecules connecting in primordial ooze, but with six Italian men playing bocce ball in a park on a cool summer evening.”

Ray Cicetti does, indeed, have “a forest in his pocket”—a forest of marvel and recognition. He’s shown it to us so that we can share in its fresh, animated place of sustenance, community, and the possibility of recalling “our own original shining.”

–Renée Ashley, Author of Ruined Traveler, a book of prose poems, and Creative Writing teacher at Farleigh Dickinson University.