I bought this collection of poetry earlier this month at Main Street Books in St. Charles on the date weekend my beautiful wife and I shared. When we go somewhere on vacation, as you know, gentle reader, we like to visit used book stores in the area. However, St. Charles has but Main Street Books which is mostly new books but has a couple of shelves of used books upstairs. I did not buy any used books this trip, but I did buy three new books at full price.
This is one of them, and it’s the first I have read as I could read it while watching football. The XFL and St. Louis Battlehawks have extended my browse-a-book-whilst-watching season, and this book was good for that.
The book collects poems from across almost fifty years (I believe the earliest is 1973), but most of them come from 2015 and 2016. It describes, fairly narratively, betrayal of a lover/spouse, a brush with death, and some basic slice-of-life narratives.
However, they poems are not very good. They tend toward straightforward narratives or laundry lists of words that have no real depth nor metaphor behind them. I mean, I feel for the poet, but mostly it’s sympathy for the things he’s expressing rather than anything the poetry itself evokes. The poems are often free verse, with only a few employing end rhymes, so I don’t feel the sort-of affection that I have for Grandma poetry you find in Ideals magazine.
Still, it’s better than Collections of Madness.
Your mileage may vary.
