More Than I Want To

by Margo Lockwood

Poetry. "Like two of my favorite poets who were born in Boston, John Weiners and Paul Hannigan, Margo Lockwood is Catholic, mystical, modest, brilliant, biting and agnostic. Sometimes she is like Li Po, sometimes like The Silent Traveller, the Chinese historian who wrote turn of the century books on American cities, but remained invisible, and sometimes she writes with the spirit of one who has dragged a broom and shaken a wooden spoon. She has the racing brain of genius common to the Irish people and seems to know everything. She certainly knows her books. The "dark door" in this volume could be the door into the one book that she will never read. But there it stands, central to her assessment of life's little atonements and ironic slights. I count her among one of the great Boston poets. She captures the strange and unnamable quality of this wayside city"--Fanny Howe.

56 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2009

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are direct, hard-won poems. The honesty of experience tempers them, and Lockwood
has clearly gone through a lot of suffering. But that doesn't mean that these poems are
the slightest bit bathetic or manipulative. They are like worn floorboards in a well-made house.
Their durability, and the beauty of the wood grain comes through.