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Shadow and Praise
It's easy to see why Terry Wolverton has a reputation as a right-on facilitator of writing I couldn't find a wasted word in these poems in spite of the rhetorical amplification that governs many of them, nor a threadbare syllogism in the often staccato, sometimes surreal thought-processes along which we are guided. The short "Shadow" section takes the self, the subjectivity, and the Other, as objects of phenomenological (and Lacanian) investigation under the aspects of Specter, Surveillance, Photophobia, Groundhog, Death, and Paradox. It defamiliarizes the proverbial Shadows of Doubt, of Shadow-Boxing, of Your Smile, of Me and My Shadow, and of the Five O'Clock Beard. The transitional "difficult praise" does indeed lead us to litanies of praise for what no one this side of Whitman has a good word for--e.g. Denial, Ultraviolet Rays, Pandora's Box, Bad Drivers, and Traffic on the 405 Freeway--as well as original takes on what everyone else praises but without Wolverton's angular, elliptical, imaginative inner e.g. Blueberries, The Senses, Heaven, Green, Living, Singing, Flowers. Eventually she finds the cosmic (and cosmically comic) capacity to praise both "everyone" and "anyone," not to mention "nothing."
These poems vibrate with controlled breathing, like American mantras infused by a higher plane of Eastern scriptural spirituality. I have the highest admiration for this achievement by a poet and human being who has spent a lifetime in preparation for such a crowning masterpiece. It's been said that some are "poets born" and others "poets made." Terry Wolverton is both. Shadow and Praise is a Himalayan Peak rising from the asphalt desert (and I love deserts) of Southern California. Yet it is start-to-finish in the accessible language that has always, for me at least, constituted the most enjoyable and rewarding tradition within SoCal poetry and, indeed, American Literature.
Gerald Locklin
Professor Emeritus of English
California State University, Long Beach
These poems vibrate with controlled breathing, like American mantras infused by a higher plane of Eastern scriptural spirituality. I have the highest admiration for this achievement by a poet and human being who has spent a lifetime in preparation for such a crowning masterpiece. It's been said that some are "poets born" and others "poets made." Terry Wolverton is both. Shadow and Praise is a Himalayan Peak rising from the asphalt desert (and I love deserts) of Southern California. Yet it is start-to-finish in the accessible language that has always, for me at least, constituted the most enjoyable and rewarding tradition within SoCal poetry and, indeed, American Literature.
Gerald Locklin
Professor Emeritus of English
California State University, Long Beach
90 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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