Verse Chronicle
Verse Chronicle
Civil Wars
This chapter reviews Michael Dickman's Flies, Henri Cole's Touch, Katherine Larson's Radial Symmetry, Billy Collins's Horoscopes for the Dead, Michael Longley's A Hundred Doors, and Geoffrey Hill's Clavics. Dickman's second collection, Flies, is filled with fever dreams of childhood, the haunting presence of his dead older brother, and flies. The poems in Cole's Touch have been written under the sign of the mother, a mother who though dead remains one of the few living presences in the poet's world. Larson is a field ecologist whose relation to nature lies somewhere between the scientist's and the poet's. In Radial Symmetry she is drawn to the mystery of things and the ways mystery can be mastered. Collins's poems are lacking in the sense that when there's sorrow, it's buffered sorrow; when there's happiness, it's discount happiness. Longley's poems in A Hundred Doors suffer from a tweedy innocence while Hill's Clavics feature thirty-two poems cast in peculiar form: a twenty-line stanza, varying from dimeter to pentameter, followed by one half as long and shaped like the winglike stanza of Herbert's “Easter Wings”.
Keywords: poets, poetry, reviews, Michael Dickman, Henri Cole, Katherine Larson, Billy Collins, Michael Longley, Geoffrey Hill
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