He's written/edited thirteen collections, though I could find no online reviews of this book which one weighs in at 120 pages. Form is often used. Here's stanza 2 of "Touch-down"
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Cold comfort in the cosy no-man's-land Off huffing theorists busy trying to climb Out of history, seeing everywhere deceits, The half-aware cheatings of previous elites Or reaching back to chide another time Where long ago is a city build on sand |
5 pages later "Footprint" begins "Sometimes ground vanishes under our feet/ As tidal waves of change sweep in so fast/ Over sand too shifting now for any retreat.. "Slope" begins
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So frail the ways that we remember, Episodes we fudge or blur, The unconscious ember We keep on raking over |
(I presume there's "ember" rather than "embers" for the sake of rhyme) and later
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Our slope of past climbed anew To fight against the grinding dust Of forgetfulness and snatch The absent back? We trust Now traces of our gone to catch Between rungs of time's vertigo Memories of things done And hallow the dead we owe. |
Too much seems rhyme-driven ("the dead we owe") or staid ("dust/ Of forgetfulness") or needlessly contorted ("traces of our gone"). After that I skimmed. There's a section of poems dedicated to people dead and alive - Mendel, Patrick Kavanagh, Shakespeare, Mandela, Gandhi, etc. The Mendel one looks informative.
Towards the end there's "Butterfly", a sonnet that starts
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Yes now and again to feel so overpowered. Could anything we ever do matter a whit? Would-be dreams, seeds that never flowered, A world just as it is and there you have it! |
Indeed.
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