Searching for Home

Searchingfor Home, Packs splendid twenty-second collection of poems,written largely during his last year of life, centers on the search formeaning. At its heart are sequences of poems about three figures, each a seekerafter some physical or conceptual home where uncertainties are overcome. CharlesDarwin circumnavigates the world and gleans the evidence for his theory ofevolution but seems to sanction a godless world of randomness and struggle. EscapingNazis, Albert Einstein immigrates to America, where he fights for peace whileunsuccessfully trying to prove his unified field theory. Pogromsforce the poets scholarly Uncle Phil from Russia to America, where he lives inreduced circumstances and longs to relocate to Israel. Searching for meaning informs other deeply felt poems, likewise renderedin supple metrical language, as do themes of empathy, peace, humor, and thebeauty of naturepushbacks against disappointment, mortality, and the humanpropensity for cruelty and violence. It is a landscape dotted with rememberedmoments of joy and wonder: otters slide down a muddy slope, kids put on ahilarious version of The Odyssey, adog teases a little boy. . . . Searching for Home is both a vision ofPacks own odyssey and his final testament to what matters.