The poems in The Hermit’s Kiss deal with facets of love, loss and aging alongside the consolations of memory and art. The title piece is the story of St. Roch, patron of bachelors and plague victims, now a church statue observing the changing and sometimes tormented world around it. Exploring the elemental subjects of solitude and the passing of time, Teleky affirms the life of the imagination because, as he writes, “I still / believe we can learn / from books.” This is the work of a mature writer at the peak of his craft.
Praise for The Hermit’s Kiss
“Admirable poems, as precise in expression as they are concise in content, alternately touching and unexpectedly amusing, pithy, elegant and opaque…Neat in both modern senses of that word, without undue self-regard, let alone self-pity, they nonetheless evoke a faint but pervasive aroma of regret.”
–Daryl Hine
“A voice that is very much of today.”
–Don Coles
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Richard Teleky 