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Pointed Sentences
Book of 114 poems.
146 pages, Paperback
First published January 7, 2012
4 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
Bill Yarrow
42 books94 followers
I am the author of the following books of poems: Critique of Pure Dreaming (academia.edu 2023), Flying Blind (Yavanika Press 2020), Accelerant (Nixes Mate Books 2019), Against Prompts (Lit Fest Press 2018), We All Saw it Coming (Locofo Chaps 2017), The Vig of Love (Glass Lyre Press 2016), Blasphemer (Lit Fest Press 2015), The Lice of Christ (MadHat Press 2014), Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku (Cervena Barva Press, 2013), Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012), Fourteen (Naked Mannekin, 2011), and Wrench (erbacce press, 2009). I have published widely in print and online journals such as RHINO, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Contrary, DIAGRAM, Thrush, PANK, Poetry International, Iodine Poetry Journal, and FRiGG. I am also professor emeritus of English at Joliet Junior College where I taught Creative Writing, Introduction to Film Study, and Introduction to Shakespeare.
Free download of "Critique of Pure Dreaming," "The Apnea Poems," "Fourteen," "100 Poems Under 100 Words," and other works at academia.edu
"Bill Yarrow hits new heights with this poetry book; it has his intellectual prowess coupled with a deep vulnerability...a breathless read that left me wanting more. Most highly recommended."
—Susan Tepper, Amazon and Facebook review of The Vig of Love
"I finished your new book, and it is excellent!!!! You have a wonderful handle on imagery and metaphor. The surrealists would include you as one of theirs. As you know, I don't like many modern poets, but you are at the top of my like list."
—Larry Mesirow Facebook review of The Vig of Love
"I was overwhelmed by the richness of this collection....Always a master of precision, Yarrow writes like silver lace on silver cloth of unpaid lovers’ debts, the past’s weight, and the sorrows of the present. There is incredible beauty in The Vig of Love, gorgeous imagery, and sinuous style. I felt the author had arrived at a place of perfect pitch, the high-wire walk between pleasure and pain as though the act of a mesmerist.."
—Stephanie Dickinson, author of Love Highway, editor of Rain Mountain Press
"Just finished Blasphemer. I love your sense of humor and your willingness to push the envelope by looking askance at sacred subjects. Good poetry helps us see something in a way that we've never envisioned it before. You succeed admirably in that respect. Yours is a book that I unreservedly recommend."
—Richard L. Hanson
Blasphemer is everything a worshiper of contemporary poetry is looking for. Thought provoking, experimental at times, complemented with a fair amount of humor and transformative language, Yarrow is a genius at exploring, and ultimately splintering, the root of our belief systems—religion, society, politics, family, and yes, the blessed writing community."
—Julie Demoff-Larson, Blot Lit Reviews
"Bill Yarrow’s very own brand of blasphemy often ends up sounding like an offbeat celebration of what Stevens called 'things as they are.' Yarrow’s complex view of reality owes a lot to his optimism and LOL sense of humor. You will find much to cherish in Yarrow’s new book, not least its range, its versatility."
—Jaime Reyes, Amazon customer review
"Yarrow's work questions traditional religion, love, and western culture in this shocking and inspiring work. 'There's No Crying in Poetry' was extremely well done and my personal favorite."
—dramaqueen17, Amazon customer review
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April 7, 20161.Review of Pointed Sentences by Kayla Greenwell. The review appeared in Blot Lit Reviews in Blotterature Magazine on May 20, 2015.
Bill Yarrow has somehow figured out a way to cage chaos. Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012) is like a trip to the future, where poetry has evolved into an ever-shifting being. His words defy categorization or replication, and Yarrow is not afraid to let his poetry wander wherever it wants to.
The poetry collection is split into three parts: Florid Psychosis, Startle Reflex, and Knot Eye. Each of these sections have poetry that turns conventionality on its back through the playful juxtaposition of words and situations. Take “The Tapeworm of Selfish Mammon Eats All the Good Will in the World,” for example:
She caretakes, he takes care
She is inclusive, he feels occluded
She takes on all comers, he takes on all commerce
She’s out on a limb, he’s still on the lam…
She begs to differ, he begs to defer…
The relationship between these two create humor, but there is also something deeper in the complication between these two characters that calls for a closer re-reading of the poem. Many of the poems in this book call for a careful re-reading, as Yarrow is truly a master of his craft. His work is clever, and deep, and only made more powerful in the willingness he has to go where his mind lets him. His work transcends titles like narrative or lyrical, although we are still bound to those words for description. His poetry simply exists, each poem its own universe—some funny, some surreal, some fantastical.
The narrators in Yarrow’s poetry add to the depth and complications of the pieces as a whole. “Annulling the Future,” is perhaps one of my favorite pieces, as it blends the bodily presence of a bride with the abstract complexities of existing and romantic relationships.
If you can’t consummate tomorrow
You may as well just annul the future.
That bride is a stick risk anyway.
Look at her—ruffles in all the wrong
Places…
Yarrow's words are immediate, and they create a narrator that is hard to ignore.
Yarrow’s narrative poetry is a complex as a novel, and as beautiful as his lyrical poetry. “Magritte,” from the first section of Yarrow’s collection, particularly spoke to me.
1.Introduction to Magritte
I pick Magritte up from the bottom of a star.
He is desolate with lavender.
“Who is it?” he moans, touching my wrist
With his wing. I help him to his feet, careful of his cedar leg.
Behind his grimace he is smiling.
Like a man drowning in warm water.
The story itself, although fantastical, has a unique familiarity. Coupled with the beauty of the imagery and the poignancy of the story.
These sentences are truly pointed. They are sharp enough to puncture the skull and dig around in your brain until they find the grey matter and latch on for life. Pointed Sentences is intricate, but also funny and accessible at the same time. This is the book the future wants you to read.
http://blotterature.com/2015/05/20/bl...
2. User review by V.V. Saichek. This review appeared on Amazon.com on July 11, 2013.
Brilliant, visionary, daring:
It is not often poetry or "Prosetry" (prose/poetry combined) has an edge of the truly experimental, but Bill Yarrow's work does. He explores what lies between psychological and physical perception with a sharpness of vision and wit. He also has an engaging, common-man voice, which lends an emotional center to all of his work, which is never off-putting or over intellectual. His work engages on two levels - that of the child surprised by a new morning and its curiosities and that of an old soul, chagrined by what he finds. Explore Bill Yarrow. He is an important voice of our time.
http://www.amazon.com/Pointed-Sentenc...
3. Review of Pointed Sentences by David Ackley. The review appeared in THIS Literary Magazine on April 18, 2012.
In Bill Yarrow’s Pointed Sentences, the poems flow from an exceptional command of language and syntax, combined with a wanderer’s willingness to go where the road takes him. With his classicist’s literacy it might be easy for Yarrow to write poetry just slightly torqued from the familiar, and to do so very successfully, but consistently he refuses the option and in doing so offers up poetry which is fresh, exciting with discovery and the sense that in his hands we’ve not simply revisited that which we already knew. The thrill of the expedition! The branches parting on the never yet seen!
Take a poem like “Here’s Looking at Euclid,” whose title, with its pun that wildly interlocks geometry and a line from a film classic, signals that the ride is likely to be a little vertiginous. Puns can be good vulgar fun and at the same time open terrain at the wilder reaches of metaphor, where connections are not just revealed but detonated into being. In the poem each stanza begins with the same two phrases, succeeded by decoupled illustrations that keep altering the focus:
He’s looking at Euclid,
But he can’t concentrate,
The noise of the Bakersfield cicadas is invading his ears.
And so through a succession of distractions “Hoboken memories are marching into his mind… The elevated smell of Delphi… A Catalan fishing boat is sailing into his eyes.”
But it takes the last stanza to reveal what else the poem is telling us about that slide show of images: that each of them has moved us and the poet another tick closer to a final reconnaissance with the inevitable.
He’s looking at Euclid
Meanwhile, the sandstorm of time
Keeps polishing the geometry of space.
Bill Yarrow’s poetry has a rare capacity to deal directly with those outermost abstractions, time and space, making them clear as the tick-tock of mortality, as close as the recollections in a fingered memento. In “ Salt Thought,” this capacity is displayed in the striking first lines with a complex and transfixing image of abstractions from which we’d usually disconnect:
The custard of eternity is scooped into
The quantum cone of knowledge and drips
Out the bottom one lifetime at a time…
The melting custard bringing us to the ocean’s edge, where:
Sunburned man stands on the boardwalk
Of emotion watching the tourists of the future
Eye the bruised merchandise of the past.
It’s emotion that gives us our sense of the present, defends it against the distancing of “tourists of the future,” and the encroachments of the past, that “bruised merchandise.” Yoked together, the thinking body, and the feeling mind through time:
Is there no escape from raw thinking (Notice the raw: painful rub of thought.)
Is there no respite from rash imagining?
… the lax head [which] lies prey
to the cawing, clawing seagulls of salt thought.
What is salt thought, but an abrasive dwelling on the essential?
Pointed Sentences is divided in three parts, each bearing the title of its opening poem: 1. “Florid Psychosis,” from which the poems discussed previously are drawn, 2. “Startle Reflex,” 3. “ Knot Eye,” titles resonant and interesting but not particularly revealing. Since the divisions are so clearly delineated and obviously mean something particular to the poet, it would have been useful to have some other hint as to why the poems were so grouped, which could have come in the form of dates of poems, if the link is simply chronological.
Although there’s no readily apparent difference in theme or approach between the first and second parts, the poems in the third, “ Knot Eye,” do seem a departure both in language and subject matter from the first two. Before addressing “Knot Eye,” however, there’s another poem worth mentioning that reveals some of Yarrow’s distinctive strengths, and shows how striking, original and profound is the best of his work.
“Black Ice on the Bridge,” proceeds by a series of unexpected stanzaic leaps, tying a vaguely rational premise to a surreal illustration, from the opening lines:
Acts have no meaning but they do have
trajectory: the string quartet waxes
the mustaches of its accusers…
Through a series of similarly constructed stanzas, each positing a kind of skewed deductive first premise – “Innocence has no meaning, but it does have motive… Appetite has no meaning… Marriage has no meaning…” – against the succeeding illustrations, which gradually acquire, kinds of “ meaning,” and the menace of an impending collision, in the final lines:
…fog spreads across the mustard grass
with no regard for the black ice on the bridge.
The ending at once as mysterious as the poem’s development and the inevitable, and satisfying aesthetic resolution. One comes to the conclusions of the best of his poems with the startled cognition of a lucky arrival at a forgotten appointment.
In general, this and all the best of his poems indicate Yarrow’s deepest poetic gift, his imaginative access to the images and language which give substance to states of mind and feeling at the edge of – and beyond – the conventionally accessible.
For the most part his poems don’t wear on their sleeves the usual linear hash marks – unconventionally broken lines and spacing – of the “experimental,” (excepting the very fine “ The Sky is Simply White,” which offers a whole catalogue of linear arrangements, all effectively employed). Yarrow’s originality comes in his use of language: sly, pointed puns (“..the groan of an eternal combustion engine…” in “Mr. Harmonica,” ); literary allusions, bent to the occasion( “Two truckers come and go talking of Tupelo…” in “Greyhound”) and uncategorizeable play, as in the title, “Drinking an Orange Julius while Listening to Pink Floyd.”
Farther along, the poems appear more objective in their observations, as on a trip to India in “Agra Road”: “… I stared out the bus window into the face of a ripe monkey…” and more personal in their history.
The final section “Knot Eye,” (Not I?) is consistently plainer in language, and along the lines of “Agra Road,” apparently autobiographical, poems chronicling a life, rather than imagined constructs. These last poems are accessible, with a clear narrative impulse and description that feels observed rather than imagined.
But here, as in all his poems, there is a music that anneals the poem to memory. Though often muted and subtle, the musicality of Yarrow’s poems is indelible. Rarely do his poems have end-rhymes, but aside from that he deploys an array of forming elements: alliteration, internal rhyme, near rhyme, cadence, assonance. Here is a musician who can play all the instruments. Take slant (and internal) rhyme, as in this unstudied sequence from “She Waited for Him,” with the echoes highlighted:
When he held her he thought of Racine
And when she held him she thought
Of Cheyenne. Of course there was nothing
in between.
A uniquely appealing feature is the felicitous couplings in some of his phrases, a kind of melodic stutter as with “the candied land,” in the “Agra Road,” or “when the future falters” in “Not Enough Sin to Go Around.” Over multiple readings it becomes clear that each of his poems has its own sonic pattern, and that the original music of the poem is woven into the content of the poem’s feeling, the tone of its thought.
The poems which stand out in Pointed Sentences, on this reading, include those already mentioned, along with “The Semaphore of Civilization,” “A Piece of Him,” “ Great Moments in Blindness,” “ Mt. Harmonica,” the elegiac “The Bison’s Alimony,” and a half dozen more. However, one can easily see – in another temper on another day – coming back to Pointed Sentences, and appreciating a whole different set with other virtues that had been overlooked.
https://sites.google.com/site/thiszin...
4. Review by Darryl Price of Pointed Sentences. This review appeared in the Fictionaut Forum on June 16, 2012.
Bill Yarrow is the best poet I know of, and I know of a lot of poets. He delights each and every time. He’s not a cruel teacher, but he holds a sturdy birch. He builds his wonderful monuments out of words to the ancient needs of expression and energy (“we think in eternity/but move slowly through/time”).
His poems appear like hovering bee hives, like the blueprints for ancient Mayan ruins, like fun puzzles, like suddenly there flowers, like deeply whispering trees(we need to crumble/our blossoms and buds/in our hands/who has felt/that powder/and been unhappy?”). In other words, his poems greet us, feed us, heal us, kick us out of the nest, and most importantly connect us together—back to something basic, innate, real, true and lasting (“The first time a poem sharpened you”).
They sing, laugh, make fun, cry (“the rich ricochet of loss”) and dance, but they always invite you to climb up the hill with the poet to look at the stars or just sit and feel the breezes within and without ourselves (“a fireman holding an ice pick/adjusts the volume.”). Can it get any better than that?
He’s a good man without trying too hard to make the beautiful point stick inside your head (“you think diction is a slick fish/I believe in scouring the sea with spears”). No easy trick, but Bill always gives it the smooth finish (“I will photograph the tree in its demise, upended in swart disarray.”).
Please, I beg you, read this book, savor it, give it to your best friends, secretly plant it in the world wherever you go, just for the sake of growing something worthwhile for any others who might hunger and thirst for such magical beans (“The world gives birth to triplets./People drop hot pennies into your hat,”) in their pocket.
Just listen to these few instances with me:
“the pillow like a wave bleeding back into the ocean…"
"the deserted/battlefield he has had tattooed on his future…"
"envy’s initials on his heart…"
"in the iron/sky, the ivory birds are still the birds…"
"Can you taste the jade dragonflies emblazoned on the walls?”
Well, can you? Me,too.
One last one:
”In my dreams, I am awake most of the night.”
With poetry this good, it’s no wonder.
dp
http://fictionaut.com/forums/general/...
Bill Yarrow has somehow figured out a way to cage chaos. Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012) is like a trip to the future, where poetry has evolved into an ever-shifting being. His words defy categorization or replication, and Yarrow is not afraid to let his poetry wander wherever it wants to.
The poetry collection is split into three parts: Florid Psychosis, Startle Reflex, and Knot Eye. Each of these sections have poetry that turns conventionality on its back through the playful juxtaposition of words and situations. Take “The Tapeworm of Selfish Mammon Eats All the Good Will in the World,” for example:
She caretakes, he takes care
She is inclusive, he feels occluded
She takes on all comers, he takes on all commerce
She’s out on a limb, he’s still on the lam…
She begs to differ, he begs to defer…
The relationship between these two create humor, but there is also something deeper in the complication between these two characters that calls for a closer re-reading of the poem. Many of the poems in this book call for a careful re-reading, as Yarrow is truly a master of his craft. His work is clever, and deep, and only made more powerful in the willingness he has to go where his mind lets him. His work transcends titles like narrative or lyrical, although we are still bound to those words for description. His poetry simply exists, each poem its own universe—some funny, some surreal, some fantastical.
The narrators in Yarrow’s poetry add to the depth and complications of the pieces as a whole. “Annulling the Future,” is perhaps one of my favorite pieces, as it blends the bodily presence of a bride with the abstract complexities of existing and romantic relationships.
If you can’t consummate tomorrow
You may as well just annul the future.
That bride is a stick risk anyway.
Look at her—ruffles in all the wrong
Places…
Yarrow's words are immediate, and they create a narrator that is hard to ignore.
Yarrow’s narrative poetry is a complex as a novel, and as beautiful as his lyrical poetry. “Magritte,” from the first section of Yarrow’s collection, particularly spoke to me.
1.Introduction to Magritte
I pick Magritte up from the bottom of a star.
He is desolate with lavender.
“Who is it?” he moans, touching my wrist
With his wing. I help him to his feet, careful of his cedar leg.
Behind his grimace he is smiling.
Like a man drowning in warm water.
The story itself, although fantastical, has a unique familiarity. Coupled with the beauty of the imagery and the poignancy of the story.
These sentences are truly pointed. They are sharp enough to puncture the skull and dig around in your brain until they find the grey matter and latch on for life. Pointed Sentences is intricate, but also funny and accessible at the same time. This is the book the future wants you to read.
http://blotterature.com/2015/05/20/bl...
2. User review by V.V. Saichek. This review appeared on Amazon.com on July 11, 2013.
Brilliant, visionary, daring:
It is not often poetry or "Prosetry" (prose/poetry combined) has an edge of the truly experimental, but Bill Yarrow's work does. He explores what lies between psychological and physical perception with a sharpness of vision and wit. He also has an engaging, common-man voice, which lends an emotional center to all of his work, which is never off-putting or over intellectual. His work engages on two levels - that of the child surprised by a new morning and its curiosities and that of an old soul, chagrined by what he finds. Explore Bill Yarrow. He is an important voice of our time.
http://www.amazon.com/Pointed-Sentenc...
3. Review of Pointed Sentences by David Ackley. The review appeared in THIS Literary Magazine on April 18, 2012.
In Bill Yarrow’s Pointed Sentences, the poems flow from an exceptional command of language and syntax, combined with a wanderer’s willingness to go where the road takes him. With his classicist’s literacy it might be easy for Yarrow to write poetry just slightly torqued from the familiar, and to do so very successfully, but consistently he refuses the option and in doing so offers up poetry which is fresh, exciting with discovery and the sense that in his hands we’ve not simply revisited that which we already knew. The thrill of the expedition! The branches parting on the never yet seen!
Take a poem like “Here’s Looking at Euclid,” whose title, with its pun that wildly interlocks geometry and a line from a film classic, signals that the ride is likely to be a little vertiginous. Puns can be good vulgar fun and at the same time open terrain at the wilder reaches of metaphor, where connections are not just revealed but detonated into being. In the poem each stanza begins with the same two phrases, succeeded by decoupled illustrations that keep altering the focus:
He’s looking at Euclid,
But he can’t concentrate,
The noise of the Bakersfield cicadas is invading his ears.
And so through a succession of distractions “Hoboken memories are marching into his mind… The elevated smell of Delphi… A Catalan fishing boat is sailing into his eyes.”
But it takes the last stanza to reveal what else the poem is telling us about that slide show of images: that each of them has moved us and the poet another tick closer to a final reconnaissance with the inevitable.
He’s looking at Euclid
Meanwhile, the sandstorm of time
Keeps polishing the geometry of space.
Bill Yarrow’s poetry has a rare capacity to deal directly with those outermost abstractions, time and space, making them clear as the tick-tock of mortality, as close as the recollections in a fingered memento. In “ Salt Thought,” this capacity is displayed in the striking first lines with a complex and transfixing image of abstractions from which we’d usually disconnect:
The custard of eternity is scooped into
The quantum cone of knowledge and drips
Out the bottom one lifetime at a time…
The melting custard bringing us to the ocean’s edge, where:
Sunburned man stands on the boardwalk
Of emotion watching the tourists of the future
Eye the bruised merchandise of the past.
It’s emotion that gives us our sense of the present, defends it against the distancing of “tourists of the future,” and the encroachments of the past, that “bruised merchandise.” Yoked together, the thinking body, and the feeling mind through time:
Is there no escape from raw thinking (Notice the raw: painful rub of thought.)
Is there no respite from rash imagining?
… the lax head [which] lies prey
to the cawing, clawing seagulls of salt thought.
What is salt thought, but an abrasive dwelling on the essential?
Pointed Sentences is divided in three parts, each bearing the title of its opening poem: 1. “Florid Psychosis,” from which the poems discussed previously are drawn, 2. “Startle Reflex,” 3. “ Knot Eye,” titles resonant and interesting but not particularly revealing. Since the divisions are so clearly delineated and obviously mean something particular to the poet, it would have been useful to have some other hint as to why the poems were so grouped, which could have come in the form of dates of poems, if the link is simply chronological.
Although there’s no readily apparent difference in theme or approach between the first and second parts, the poems in the third, “ Knot Eye,” do seem a departure both in language and subject matter from the first two. Before addressing “Knot Eye,” however, there’s another poem worth mentioning that reveals some of Yarrow’s distinctive strengths, and shows how striking, original and profound is the best of his work.
“Black Ice on the Bridge,” proceeds by a series of unexpected stanzaic leaps, tying a vaguely rational premise to a surreal illustration, from the opening lines:
Acts have no meaning but they do have
trajectory: the string quartet waxes
the mustaches of its accusers…
Through a series of similarly constructed stanzas, each positing a kind of skewed deductive first premise – “Innocence has no meaning, but it does have motive… Appetite has no meaning… Marriage has no meaning…” – against the succeeding illustrations, which gradually acquire, kinds of “ meaning,” and the menace of an impending collision, in the final lines:
…fog spreads across the mustard grass
with no regard for the black ice on the bridge.
The ending at once as mysterious as the poem’s development and the inevitable, and satisfying aesthetic resolution. One comes to the conclusions of the best of his poems with the startled cognition of a lucky arrival at a forgotten appointment.
In general, this and all the best of his poems indicate Yarrow’s deepest poetic gift, his imaginative access to the images and language which give substance to states of mind and feeling at the edge of – and beyond – the conventionally accessible.
For the most part his poems don’t wear on their sleeves the usual linear hash marks – unconventionally broken lines and spacing – of the “experimental,” (excepting the very fine “ The Sky is Simply White,” which offers a whole catalogue of linear arrangements, all effectively employed). Yarrow’s originality comes in his use of language: sly, pointed puns (“..the groan of an eternal combustion engine…” in “Mr. Harmonica,” ); literary allusions, bent to the occasion( “Two truckers come and go talking of Tupelo…” in “Greyhound”) and uncategorizeable play, as in the title, “Drinking an Orange Julius while Listening to Pink Floyd.”
Farther along, the poems appear more objective in their observations, as on a trip to India in “Agra Road”: “… I stared out the bus window into the face of a ripe monkey…” and more personal in their history.
The final section “Knot Eye,” (Not I?) is consistently plainer in language, and along the lines of “Agra Road,” apparently autobiographical, poems chronicling a life, rather than imagined constructs. These last poems are accessible, with a clear narrative impulse and description that feels observed rather than imagined.
But here, as in all his poems, there is a music that anneals the poem to memory. Though often muted and subtle, the musicality of Yarrow’s poems is indelible. Rarely do his poems have end-rhymes, but aside from that he deploys an array of forming elements: alliteration, internal rhyme, near rhyme, cadence, assonance. Here is a musician who can play all the instruments. Take slant (and internal) rhyme, as in this unstudied sequence from “She Waited for Him,” with the echoes highlighted:
When he held her he thought of Racine
And when she held him she thought
Of Cheyenne. Of course there was nothing
in between.
A uniquely appealing feature is the felicitous couplings in some of his phrases, a kind of melodic stutter as with “the candied land,” in the “Agra Road,” or “when the future falters” in “Not Enough Sin to Go Around.” Over multiple readings it becomes clear that each of his poems has its own sonic pattern, and that the original music of the poem is woven into the content of the poem’s feeling, the tone of its thought.
The poems which stand out in Pointed Sentences, on this reading, include those already mentioned, along with “The Semaphore of Civilization,” “A Piece of Him,” “ Great Moments in Blindness,” “ Mt. Harmonica,” the elegiac “The Bison’s Alimony,” and a half dozen more. However, one can easily see – in another temper on another day – coming back to Pointed Sentences, and appreciating a whole different set with other virtues that had been overlooked.
https://sites.google.com/site/thiszin...
4. Review by Darryl Price of Pointed Sentences. This review appeared in the Fictionaut Forum on June 16, 2012.
Bill Yarrow is the best poet I know of, and I know of a lot of poets. He delights each and every time. He’s not a cruel teacher, but he holds a sturdy birch. He builds his wonderful monuments out of words to the ancient needs of expression and energy (“we think in eternity/but move slowly through/time”).
His poems appear like hovering bee hives, like the blueprints for ancient Mayan ruins, like fun puzzles, like suddenly there flowers, like deeply whispering trees(we need to crumble/our blossoms and buds/in our hands/who has felt/that powder/and been unhappy?”). In other words, his poems greet us, feed us, heal us, kick us out of the nest, and most importantly connect us together—back to something basic, innate, real, true and lasting (“The first time a poem sharpened you”).
They sing, laugh, make fun, cry (“the rich ricochet of loss”) and dance, but they always invite you to climb up the hill with the poet to look at the stars or just sit and feel the breezes within and without ourselves (“a fireman holding an ice pick/adjusts the volume.”). Can it get any better than that?
He’s a good man without trying too hard to make the beautiful point stick inside your head (“you think diction is a slick fish/I believe in scouring the sea with spears”). No easy trick, but Bill always gives it the smooth finish (“I will photograph the tree in its demise, upended in swart disarray.”).
Please, I beg you, read this book, savor it, give it to your best friends, secretly plant it in the world wherever you go, just for the sake of growing something worthwhile for any others who might hunger and thirst for such magical beans (“The world gives birth to triplets./People drop hot pennies into your hat,”) in their pocket.
Just listen to these few instances with me:
“the pillow like a wave bleeding back into the ocean…"
"the deserted/battlefield he has had tattooed on his future…"
"envy’s initials on his heart…"
"in the iron/sky, the ivory birds are still the birds…"
"Can you taste the jade dragonflies emblazoned on the walls?”
Well, can you? Me,too.
One last one:
”In my dreams, I am awake most of the night.”
With poetry this good, it’s no wonder.
dp
http://fictionaut.com/forums/general/...
July 9, 2018
A few pieces that stood out and a few that struck me as profound. However, most were just pedantic. It was hard to get through. The good ones made it worth it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews