Our Portion

Our Portion, the new and selected collection of Philip Terman, illustrates the poet's deep understanding and compassion for our world. Spanning twenty years of poetry, this collection of poems focuses on themes of nature, literature, family, and Judaism.

“Philip Terman's "Our Portion: New and Selected Poems" is an amazingly rich and vibrant collection of poems. Terman regales us with poems rooted in the Jewish faith and tradition. The poems do not preach but instead instruct us in a way of seeing the world. They are lyrical and transcendant, exultant and poignant. He celebrates the natural world and human relationships with equal ease and grace. Terman's world is a gracious world, presided over by a God who loves not only us but creation in its entirety. The new poems in the collection are compelling to read and establish Terman's greatness as a poet.-Sonja James, The Journal (WV)”

"In Our Portion, Philip Terman charts the seasons of a life in the garden—a life rooted in Jewish tradition and animated by love. Expansive, generous, he celebrates and sings the beauty of Creation, the lovers in one another’s arms, the birds at their song. Though he is mindful of the griefs of a fallen order, he keeps returning us to what redeems and nourishes, inviting us in poem after poem to marvel with him at “the spontaneous melody of the moment." —Chana Bloch 

"This is a big-hearted, large-minded book, rich in its religious heritage yet wonderfully ironic, in its particulars, about those same compelling cultural connections. The flow of the writing, too, is thoroughly complete and poignantly alive in its follow-through, as if the poems were engaging the reader in real-life chat-narratives. Philip Terman’s Our Portion is a work of profound maturity, practical wisdom, and reconciliation with what is possible." —Stanley Plumly

Philip Terman is the author of four books of poetry and four limited edition chapbooks. He has received the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poetry on the Jewish Experience, the Kenneth Patchen Award, andthe Sow's Ear Prize. He is a professor of English at Clarion University, where he directs the Spoken Art Reading Series.

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