Customer Reviews

BLESSINGS BODY GAVE (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

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Walt McDonald uses vowels as well as almost any contemporary poet I've read. His work offers insight on his own life, often concentrating on the major wars of our time: his childhood during WWII, his service in Vietnam, his reactions to the Persian Gulf as both a concerned parent and distant observer. His writing opens up his own spirit to the reader in a way I admire, and he "keeps his head on," so to speak, demonstrating that he has spent intense effort both thinking about his experiences and transforming them into poetry. Highly recommended.

This, like so much other blather we are asked to believe is poetry, is simply a collection of uninteresting stories broken up into what is supposed to resemble a poem -- akin to that kook who wraps city blocks in pink plastic, calls it art and charges the city $1 million, or the "painter" who throws a few buskets of latex in the general direction of a canvas and calls it art, or the "visionary" who piles garbage on the floor of a museum and calls it "art."

How is it that poets can throw a bunch of words in the general direction of a page, telling us "they come from my soul" or "give meaning to the angst I have felt since I was 5 days old" and have half the literary world fawning over them as if they were the Dead Sea scrolls...but an imaginiative fiction author's story is panned, citing lack of "character development" and "significant plot progress" and other such condemnation?