The Crashaw Prizewinner. He's had poems in AGNI and American Poetry Review. He was born in America, recently living in Edinburgh.
Quite a few of the poems are death-haunted. "The Grave-tender" is a pantoum. "Retrieving the Dead" is a sonnet. "The Water is Cold" begins "and my grandfather is dying". He's not mentioned again, but in the 4 stanzas, "violet", "orange", "grey", "blue" and "green" are, the final line being "adrift in the spectrum". Remains feature in several poems - "always I dream/ that you will look for me, find a sign in my bones,/ craft a sternum pendant" (p.24), "the ashes are back to ashes, the dust/ follows dust" (p.40), "Safe, thinking my bones/are buried, that the past is the past/ is the past, and I am not coming home" (p.42)
The "Unfinished Rooms" sequence is flat - for example, the first poem in it ends "It was an attic room/ with a slanted ceiling/ and there were times// when it was so still,/ cold and quiet,/ it felt like camping". I liked "Babel", "Bluegrass", "The Day He Went to War", "Last Night, I Should Have Driven Straight Home" and "Waiting for the Ocean".
Many of the poems have a narrative. There are dramatic monologues, but also poems where a single theme is followed through to the end. In "I Was a Fat Boy", the persona once saw the world as made of sweets. At the end, "A thin man catches/ my eye from a garden. I've not felt/ so hungry for a while. The world is not mine,/ my heart wobbles like yolk". The final poem, "And Table, You are Made of Wood", begins "If you could drink the white wine that sucks/ your color the way jellyfish pull shade from sand" and ends "I could be you, dear table,/ so much wine and rings and we could speak/ of scratches - // of lost energy and solid waiting./ I too have been cut, had my meaning moved/ far from where I thought it was."
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