| Each issue we will try to include reviews of books and chapbooks we have received—some we like more than others, but all are, in our estimation, interesting and worth reading. In this issue, we offer reviews of Anthony Abbott's New & Selected Poems, Glenda Beall's Now Might As Well Be Then, Joseph Bathanti's Land of Amnesia, Mike Smith's Multiverse: A Bestiary, Tim Peeler's Checking Out, and Jessie Carty's The Wait of Atom. Our Featured review of Anthony Abbott's New & Selected Poems, is in full below. To read the entire selection of Wild Goose reviews, click here |
Reviews |
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| Anthony Abbott's New & Selected Poems. (Lorimer Press, 2009, 117 pages. $18.95) I was crossing the causeway to Wrightsville Beach early in the morning on my way to the North Carolina Writers' Network Fall Conference when suddenly and inexplicably, I began to cry. I'm a sensitive guy. I'll admit that I cry pretty easily, but usually not without present and apparent cause. I pulled off to the side of road, looked into the sunrise and began to realize that the source of this uncontrolled outburst of emotion was the intimate resonance of the poems I had been reading over the past couple of days from Anthony Abbott's New and Selected Poems. This will not be the usual scholarly review of a new book of poems. I started it that way, but Abbott's work needs little scholarly commentary. His are poems intended to be understood not just by critics and other poets, but by every reader. They are written in such a way, in fact, that long before the reader achieves a clear cognitive grasp of their meaning, he or she will already be under their emotional influence, will already understand and have been transported by the poems' emotional center. And so, this will be my first (and perhaps only) poetic review of poetry and an expression of gratitude to Tony Abbott for helping me feel more fully the urgency of now. Crossing the Causeway to Wrightsville Beach, November 2009 The cormorants line up above the causeway, their morning posture of feeding as ancient as trees, older than even the first iambic lines. We drive beneath them and rarely take notice, not even of the stickle-backed sky full of clouds that has lingered beyond them longer than reckoning. I pull off the road to write down the line I pull off the road as if it mattered even more than destinations, than the timelessness of cormorants perched above the road that I get these lines down because – what? They have something vital to say? They're all I have in the face of eternity? They, like young girls running, help fend off the darkness. After Reading Tony Abbott I can't think of the date today, not just what day it is, but even what month. I write down October, cross it out, December, cross it out, finally come to November's season of lost leaves. I've read my friend's poems in which he still mourns the loss of his daughter some forty years in the past, the grief as fresh in his mind as what he had for breakfast mere moments ago. The sun is bright before me, the road blurred with runners, each one carefully prepared for what they'll face. I think of my own daughter and how she'll grow up one day if she survives the shattered windshield, aggression of microbes, cruel hand of fate, and I'll no longer have to write on roadsides, plenty of time and peace at home, and nothing left to write about. |