Hotel at the End of the World – by Dinah Berland – NWVS #161

How lovely and rare it is to find a book of purely lyrical poetry like Hotel at the End of the World. With images that are at once visually vivid and musical—“the silver sheets of light,” “a shawl of rain draped across a distant mountain”—Dinah Berland’s book draws us in with all our senses and shepherds us through broad landscapes of feeling. Humor merges with memory and longing in poems about her childhood self, her family, her ancestors: “I’m on a double-helix rollback toward my ancestors, / An unfurled scroll reaching back . . .” In the words of its tender title poem, Hotel at the End of the World offers us a plenitude of “ways . . . of repairing the heart.”

–Marcia Falk, author of Inner East: Illuminated Poems and Blessings

In this affecting collection, Dinah Berland moves—in deft sonnets, a fine sestina, and a terrific ghazal, as well as lyrical free verse—from the personal to the political, between the worldly and the otherworldly. In “Milk Glass,” a post-shower glimpse at a reflection in a fogged-up mirror suggests “the way the soul goes when it flies / out of the body.” In the book’s penultimate poem, the promise of “tranquil weather” inspires a retrospective look at an imagined life devoid of disappointment and loss, which are the subjects of so many of these wistful yet life-affirming poems.

–Jacqueline Osherow, author of My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple

There is so much quiet magic in these poems, so much tenderness and skill. Dinah Berland achieves a kind of seamlessness, here, between worlds—the worlds of the living and the dead, of waking and of dreams, of art and life, of the terrible and the beautiful. Even while the poems embrace the ordinariness of our everyday existence, they are reaching far beyond it, toward a kind of eternity.

–Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem