In The Disappearing Trick, Len Roberts wrestles with the loss of loved ones—whether that loss be through death, a son moving away to college, or simply how people fade from our lives and memories. Hybrids of the narrative and lyric form, these poems are models of indirect statement that have, as Sharon Olds has said, "emotional courage, powerful music, and a deep balance." Like the light shining on a face, or a girl's thigh back in a sixth-grade class, the poems often come as Proustian flashes—lasting just a second, but seeming eternal—amid an increasing darkness.
| Contents I Washing the Steps My Old Friend, My Daughter, October, Wassergass I blame it on him I CAN'T FORGET YOU. The Silent Archangels The Eternal Present of the Ancient Chinese PoetsA Cover Girl Sparkle Flicking Receiving at the Kneeling Rail The Disappearing Trick Pear Tart II Pitching in the Aggie A Room for Jesus The Right Dress The starlings fill the trees At the Breakfast Table with My Seventeen-Year-Old Son Car on the Road, Late July, Wassergass Letter to HC in the Hospital MISSING Fireflies at the Cohoes Drive-In The saints always Card Game III Indulgences for the Dead In the Expert Valet Clothing Shop Another Lent, the purple shrouds Trying to Read Han Shan Limbo, Wassergass The San Miguel All-Mexican Band Lucky Bullfrog, Wassergass SuetB Sequence Sleep-Eaze IV The Chasm Four-Way Switch The Ninth Circle, Wassergass I keep repeating the name of the concerto Letter #3 to Carruth about the Heron Hanging Tinsel Snowflakes in Hell Considering Aunt Bea's white Toyota Celica ____________________ A. "Poets" here, "Poems" on page. See note. B. Changed to match the order of poems; please let me know if you'd rather change the order of poems to match the contents. 8 Right after Mass Inside the dim kitchen the rosary Window Candle V Heaven's Gate Our Son Leaves His Miniature Japanese Sand Garden Behind Because There Will Be No Room in the Dorm Compensate The Failed Disappearing Trick My Father, Setting the Line, Sunny October Monitoring Impulses Sister Aquinas, Questioning Peaches in Pennsylvania Late August What does a man who's 55 say Window of Our Soul Dinner with My Son, Casey Lynn's Diner, Hellertown | "As all good poetry does, that of Len Roberts directs one to the inexhaustible potential of human experience as a source of imaginative enlargement, even when that experience is exclusively the author's own. His death last year was a real loss to poetry."—Poetry Salzburg Review
"Autobiography is the mediocre default mode of modern American poetry, yet Roberts, who has mined his dysfunctional family of origin, Catholic schooling, libidinous longings, and other personal tribulations for decades, writes outstanding autobiographical poetry by carefully conjuring the scenes, actions, and sequences of what he reports and letting those details, rather than any stated feelings about them, evoke the reader's empathy."—Booklist

"When Len Roberts passed away this spring, we lost one of our best narrative poets at the height of his powers."—Virginia Quarterly Review

|Len Roberts's poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the American Poetry Review, the Hudson Review, the Kenyon Review, Poetry, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His many books include The Silent Singer: New and Selected Poems, The Trouble-Making Finch, and Counting the Black Angels.