1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 0 stars

“A surprising collection of personal and grand poems, weaving fluidly through the forest of profane experience as smoke signals.

As with everything Getty, in Repose we get discourse on what society's brave enough and not brave enough to look at, with honest, though dispiriting, results. Dispiriting not because the view is so bleak, but because the strength is not being found to follow Getty's example: a clear, and objectively free perception.”

Joe Girard wrote this review Saturday, May 10 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Having just gone through a similar, but less devastating experience with my own mother, it's odd I didn't pick this up sooner.

I'd seen it at the library for months, deciding only after a year had elapsed since I found out about my mom's cancer, to do something about it.

Since the woman on the cover looks so much like my mom did at the worst of the chemo--not just the baldness, but the shape of her face and her dragging depression--I was terrified to read a story where all didn't come out alright.

My involvement with my mom's cancer was to be there at her home when she got back from meeting. Not nearly as all involved as the characters in the story were with their mother.

So I related only abstractly, and I ended up not being sad at all, really. Moved. But not sad.

I recommend this piece for its bold humour in the face of death, and the comfort that I know similarly situated persons would find in it.”

Joe Girard wrote this review Saturday, November 17 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Kind of the most indispensable collection of poems ever formed. So, it sucks that I don't own a copy. I know several people who do, so it never seemed financially sensible.

Since a more personal approach to compiling great poems will result in books like Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn, or Mark Strand's The Making of a Poem, where the collection is made or broke by your connection to the compiler's taste, The Top 500 Poems takes a far more reliable route. The poems presented are simply the 500 that appear most frequently throughout English textbooks and newspapers and the like, worldwide. What this presents is an encouraging (or cynic-making depending) look at what the earth deems good poetry.

If five million Frenchmen can't be wrong, can the entire world of editors and publishers be?

What's lost from this collection is a lot of the more experimental and visual forms of poetry that have developed in the last century, neither bpnichol nor Christian Bok making any appearance. But given the breadth of genres, subgenres, and curiosities included within these pages, one is sure to come away with a taste for where poetry is headed. And, muse willing, the will to seek it out.

Since modern work hasn't had much time to circulate, it's not surprising that the last hundred years of work make up a tiny fraction of the 500. If one is disappointed by the volume of familiar and retreaded works here included, remember that, considering the rate at which newer poems will in the future circulate electronically, a Top 500 Poems released in 2099 may include nothing written before 2007.

Still, you'll find Plath's Daddy, and Williams' Red Wheel Barrow, to balance out the Old English rhymes that might not tickle your adventurous, poetry-exploring spirit.

The guts of the book is a distilled tome of the best works by the best poets in history. Who could say no to that?”

Joe Girard wrote this review Saturday, November 10 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“One must frequently remember when judging poetry that the voice and the writer are separate entities.

Such is not the case with James Deahl.

It would probably be dishonest to write a review for this work without mentioning that Jim is basically my father in law. I say dishonest because one should compose reviews objectively with you, the reader, in mind. And I just can't be very objective about Jim's work.

Yet.

The collection compiles selected works from three of Jim's other books: Songs of Iberia, The Gift, and Heartland.

In Songs of Iberia the highlight is Deahl's eight translations of Lorca. The original pieces are a literary backpacking through some of Jim's world experiences. With English he lassos together first world familiarities in these alien landscapes to show the reader why we say the unfathomable world is actually small.

The Gift is a heartwarming and mesmerizing travelogue of his journey through the birth process...twice! To accent and balance the collection (and maybe to drain some of the sap), he includes a long series of poems meditating on the loss of his eldest daughter to her moving away to England.

Heartland is an exhaustive exploration of Pittsburgh life, and the only down-point of the collection. With the brief zip of Songs of Iberia and the embarrassing full-frontal nature of The Gift, Heartland anchors the reader in a stationary location. Though Deahl's concept of Pittsburgh is expansive and exotic, encircling locales and emotions diverse and fruitful, it drags when coupled with the other, shorter collections. The tragedy is that so many of the most memorable poems are found lodged here. And no collection of Deahl, immortalized in the film Under the Watchful Eye, documenting his life and work, would be complete without an exhaustive study of Pittsburgh life and reason.

I recommend you find and read this book, not just because of my familial relation and my admiration. But because when it comes to finding the emotion and context in humanityless nature, Jim Deahl makes JRR Tolkien look like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Poems to read from this collection: Indigo Bunting, If Only, The Gift, Staghorn, Encrucijada”

Joe Girard wrote this review Friday, November 9 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Jan Zwicky is a tall, (forgive the term) bookish, and powerful woman, despite her slender physique. When she gives a reading she commands the space with her confident intellect, and cottony easyness with her own work. She reads it like a character in Six Feet Under expressing spontaneous emotion: with candour, freedom, and virility. In film land she'd be portrayed by Nicole Kidman.

So, it is a shock to me that a mind like hers produces work that is as simple as it is humble.

These poems are graceful soundbites of an inner narrative that, in its entirety, should be far more feverishly sought than it is. Taking place in common situations like the bath or the fields outside the porch, or daytime or nighttime, one is seduced by the unique reconfiguration of these commonalities.

Every little slice of poem contains a simile or metaphor that has up until now gone unexpressed by poets. Which is singularly no big feat. But the unity of this freshness throughout the book is what makes it worth drawing to.

Hers is a constant voice. Her voice. And brilliant.”

Joe Girard wrote this review Friday, November 9 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Delisle's conscious artistic approach to life is the biggest feature that recommends this piece.

The frantic, often jarring, time jumps make it difficult to judge this as one might judge a memoir narrative. After a hundred pages it becomes flipping through a friend's photo album of an exotic vacation. Only the friend chose to snap off story-photos of more secret, sombre, and isolated moments of their trip.

Benefiting from Delisle's conversational confession tone, snippets come off as sequential as letters in the alphabet, telling a story that progresses in funny and touching microcosms. The macrocosm of the work is untimately a bit as unsatisfying as Delisle's stay in China.

Too scurrying and rapid, without a well-conceived through-line. But beautifully rendered.”

Joe Girard wrote this review Friday, November 9 2007. ( reply | permalink )