Coelacanth

by Rick Mullin

Grounded by generous humor, graced with charming music, Rick Mullin's latest collection, Coelacanth, mingles the modesty of a man in need / of better shoes with the regal bearing of the artist-as-hero, one gifted with a formula for magic, the last of an untamed, legendary breed. In a world gone austere and ashen, in an age when mythology has reached a sorry pass, we are comforted by Mullin's poems, which share with the famous living-fossil fish of the book's title the power to inspire wonder in things long since thought to have disappeared from the earth. --Ernest Hilbert

84 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2013

Reviews

[George Witte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Mullin's third collection is a gathering of short and mid-length poems in a variety of forms, which display his modest but sharp wit, his wide-ranging experience (as a painter, traveler, workingman, and inhabitant of the edges of places and scenes), and his unpretentious mastery of formal verse. Given that his first two collections, Huncke and Soutine, were book-length poems of the highest ambition, written in devilishly-difficult rhyme schemes, it was a pleasure to roam among these shorter poems and go to school on writing sonnets, sestinas, quatrains, and Mullin's own invented structures. Perhaps this more accessible collection will draw new readers for this underappreciated poet.