What do you think?
Rate this book
Easy Marks
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2008
About the author
Gail White
41 books3 followersGail is widely published in the world of formal poetry. Her home is in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana where she lives on the Bayou Teche with her husband and cats.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 14, 2021
Now, in middle age,
I’m told my dismal state is just depression,
Reactive, mild—here, try a little Prozac.
Damn it, I don’t want drugs. I only want
to be eccentric, batty, somewhat daft,
covered by Aunt Leona’s mental mist.
Again, my generation gets the shaft.
I’m due for a breakdown, and they don’t exist.
From ”Breaking Down in the South”
Gail White’s collection Easy Marks is full of humor. She wrestles with middle age, being a woman, being a middle-aged Southern woman living along the Bayou Teche, etc. White’s verse is formalistic, full of cadence and rhyming lines. If you ever struggle to make sense of free verse, then White is for you. Be aware that while White is more than capable of executing some powerful lines and profound thoughts, she also scripts some clunkers. As W. B. Yeats noted, to write a good line of poetry is to work like a servant scrubbing a brick floor on hands and knees, but the reader must be oblivious: “Oh, look, how inevitable the line, how inevitable the rhyme.” Unfortunately, at some points in this collection, White throws the towel aside and doesn’t do much scrubbing:
Haven’t you noticed it’s a lovely day?
The kind that makes you want to jump and run?
But even jogging, you can’t throw away
that cell phone, can you? Why, you’ve just begun
to give you boss a sales plan that will stun
competitors and make your rivals drown.
Look out, you fool! You’re running down a nun,
so would you kindly put your cell phone down?
From Ballad of Indignation
I have no issue with formal verse, but this stanza is poorly worded. I don’t enjoy finding Dr. Seuss in my poetry venting hatred about the use of cell phones in public.
I enjoyed this collection. When White’s subject and form are aligned, we get some powerful verse—and more than a welcome dose of humor. I’ll close with her sonnet “For a Senior Killed on Prom Night.” While the title worried me more than a little, the result encapsulates what I find enjoyable in White’s poetry:
It’s useless to pretend you would have been
a genius. I taught you and I know.
You made the team, but others made it win.
A ready smile made up for being slow.
You’d have been ordinary in the end:
the hardest worker someone ever had,
one woman’s husband and one man’s best friend,
recipient of cards for “world’s best dad.”
So why, where you’d have been, is there a blank
so huge, a hole where all thoughts go to die?
The world has only lost one of its rank
and file. You didn’t even make me cry.
Why do I go outside at one a.m.
and search the stars as though I’d numbered them?
Louisiana Poetry Reviews
Night Bus to the Afterlife <--------> The Gymnast of Inertia: Poems
I’m told my dismal state is just depression,
Reactive, mild—here, try a little Prozac.
Damn it, I don’t want drugs. I only want
to be eccentric, batty, somewhat daft,
covered by Aunt Leona’s mental mist.
Again, my generation gets the shaft.
I’m due for a breakdown, and they don’t exist.
From ”Breaking Down in the South”
Gail White’s collection Easy Marks is full of humor. She wrestles with middle age, being a woman, being a middle-aged Southern woman living along the Bayou Teche, etc. White’s verse is formalistic, full of cadence and rhyming lines. If you ever struggle to make sense of free verse, then White is for you. Be aware that while White is more than capable of executing some powerful lines and profound thoughts, she also scripts some clunkers. As W. B. Yeats noted, to write a good line of poetry is to work like a servant scrubbing a brick floor on hands and knees, but the reader must be oblivious: “Oh, look, how inevitable the line, how inevitable the rhyme.” Unfortunately, at some points in this collection, White throws the towel aside and doesn’t do much scrubbing:
Haven’t you noticed it’s a lovely day?
The kind that makes you want to jump and run?
But even jogging, you can’t throw away
that cell phone, can you? Why, you’ve just begun
to give you boss a sales plan that will stun
competitors and make your rivals drown.
Look out, you fool! You’re running down a nun,
so would you kindly put your cell phone down?
From Ballad of Indignation
I have no issue with formal verse, but this stanza is poorly worded. I don’t enjoy finding Dr. Seuss in my poetry venting hatred about the use of cell phones in public.
I enjoyed this collection. When White’s subject and form are aligned, we get some powerful verse—and more than a welcome dose of humor. I’ll close with her sonnet “For a Senior Killed on Prom Night.” While the title worried me more than a little, the result encapsulates what I find enjoyable in White’s poetry:
It’s useless to pretend you would have been
a genius. I taught you and I know.
You made the team, but others made it win.
A ready smile made up for being slow.
You’d have been ordinary in the end:
the hardest worker someone ever had,
one woman’s husband and one man’s best friend,
recipient of cards for “world’s best dad.”
So why, where you’d have been, is there a blank
so huge, a hole where all thoughts go to die?
The world has only lost one of its rank
and file. You didn’t even make me cry.
Why do I go outside at one a.m.
and search the stars as though I’d numbered them?
Louisiana Poetry Reviews
Night Bus to the Afterlife <--------> The Gymnast of Inertia: Poems
January 18, 2014
I am a huge fan of Gail White, the person and the poet. Of course, you meet her when you meet her poetry so sit down and plan to meet a quirky, insightful person who comments on cell phones in "Ballad of Indignation", the death of a parent in "Last Encounter" and nervous breakdowns in Breaking down in the South" (my personal favorite). Fifty-four poems will give you an opportunity to meet Gail, too. Enjoy!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews