The family obviously draws on a wealth of literary references, there are e. e. cummings inspired parenthesis that litter the pages as well as nods to Shakespeare (I sleep, I dream) and Keats (ode to a cam girl). Spending time with the other denizens of the Cafe Trieste during the 80s surely rubbed off on him. But Herbert wears his influences on his sleeve, not for him the stream of consciousness of Ginsberg or the surrealness of Kerouac, instead we get the Sysyphean verses.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of The Dinner Party by Colleen Keating
In The Dinner Party Keating brings to light what for centuries has been ignored: the power and strength of women. Keating resuscitates the experience of women in this book. Her poetry traces the lives of women who demonstrated their influence, broke barriers, gave their lives for others, were oppressed or defied patriarchy.
Invasion Without Malice: A Review of Lanternfly August by Robin Gow
These poems are rich in nature-language like thorax, legs, forest, ribs, and peach pits. So it’s fitting that this book reminds me of a tree with roots ensnared in the earth. Yet, there is also an edge of brisk oddity that brings to mind the uppermost branches of a tree, swung wildly about by a strong wind. Examples of this oddity include, what kind of metal sleep you take? and I used to want to be a dinner plate so badly.
Life’s Battle Sites: On Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s Incantations: Love Poems for Battle Sites
The San Gabriel Mission is just one of the many battle sites that make up Bermejo’s new poetry collection Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, exploring the internal and external concerns about the current state of fear and chaos in America and how past unresolved fear and chaos can still haunt us.
A review of If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin
There is so much pain in this collection that it is hard to bear. What makes the reader continue is the poet’s ability to encompass so much in each poem. Whether it’s the varied content, as illustrated in the poems described above, or the raw emotion she conveys as she stares directly at life and its inevitable end, her work must be read.
A review of Slack Tide by Sarah Day
Day observes the world, finds connections between things, explores invisible currents that influence life like environmental issues, the social, and the geo-political. Many of her poems highlight the incongruences that we face each day like observing the beauty of our planet and at the same time its destruction.
A review of Good Housekeeping by Bruce E. Whitacre
The “message” in these urgently tangible sensations – touch, sound, sight, smell – is conveyed in the titles of several of Whitacre’s concluding poems, “At the End of the Day,” Just Be,” and “Remember to Live.” It’s the same insistence Mary Oliver memorably emphasizes when she writes about this “one wild and precious life” that we live.
A review of Ghost Poetry by Robbie Coburn
Ghost Poetry is a poetry collection that converts anguish and sadness into a creative power. There is suffering throughout the book, but the strength that underpins the pain is unmistakable, like a wild horse “burning unbridled inside the sky’s ceiling” exerting its will to live.
A review of We are the Walrus by Pete Mullineaux
The poet aptly observes a ‘Bovine Heaven’. However, it also subtly indicates that such peaceful living is impossible for human beings, be it from a sociological or ecological perspective. It also sets off a train of thought where Earth is not left the same from one generation to the next.
A review of Review of River City Fires by Derek Annis
We’re not taken through the streets of this city as much as we are taken on a tour of language. These poems are driven by sound, and a tone that lulls us until images catch, tumble open, or almost combust. Pace and momentum shape the collection, delivering softly-stated violence often inflicted by the natural world upon itself. In Still Life with Razor Blade, we see “night cut evening’s /throat to let the dark out.”