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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond The Everyday,
By BJ (Prairie Land, KS USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Just Below the Water Line (Paperback)
I started reading "Just Below The Water Line" with the idea of skimming but before I knew it, I was taken in. Slattery's voice is singular and immediately engaging. And although his words are usually simple, they are never simplistic. He also has a seemingly open and clear manner of expression (no showy verbal gymnastics) but what he says is often subtly layered with different levels of meaning. In fact it's apparent in most of his poems, Slattery is trying for another dimension beyond the usual everyday mind-and-sensory human experience. Except of course that other invisible dimension IS very much a part of our daily human experience, sometimes defined perhaps as an "essence" or a "meaning" but it's nearly always "out there" just beyond reach, or just below the water line of mortal consciousness. Slattery doesn't try to define it. Rather his approach to that other dimension reminds me of someone in the middle of a journey where the destination is uncertain but anticipated.
I also found Slattery's writing overall a wonder of qualities: eloquent and graceful, then blunt and hard-hitting; serious and acute, then witty and fun; innovative and imaginative, then very plainly straight forward. It has darkness and light and special effects, yet is never forced or faked. So all in all I'd say Slattery is a very exceptional writer and poet - perhaps even a philosopher. At the same time he strikes me as the kind of guy you'd like to meet and hang out with. But before you do, read this book.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just Below The Water Line: An Alchemy in Image, Soul and Self,
By
This review is from: Just Below the Water Line (Paperback)
I had the privelege of spending time in the landscape of this poetry while it was still a manuscript. The poet, in asking me to look at it, had asked only that I "respond to the experience with fresh poetic eyes." So I began dreaming about water lines and perspective even before the manuscript reached my mailbox.
It was not until much later, when I saw the book cover, that Venus Anadyomene breached the thin skin of my water-waking reverie in its quest for perspective. What if you could clothe a spirit of motion pouring through a wound in the nature of psyche expressing the psyche of this matter with words the way Arnold Böcklin clothed Venus Rising in the diaphanous gown of water? Will this poetry and this poet (does he and will it) somehow take me to this deeper plane of experience where words are mere tools giving shape to dialectics between soul and self? If the perspective asks that we dip below the flow of words on paper, not only is a soul of water and word meaning to be found outside us and in the world we experience, but water becomes a central image for a standing depth beneath us, a mirror of "under" standing "just below" us. If so, and this is the journey we are to take through the body of this work, then let us proceed with this in mind and enter the brink. Who, in image, under-standing us (re)imagines us just so? Water, and even more specifically, it is ocean water (Oceanus). Water then, imagines and is the author-at-large in my perspectives where the poet is seeing and expressing throughout the body of these selected poems, water's life to me. The author (de)scribes this for me in the title and in doing so, invites me to enter what is well-versed through the telos of water's own re-imagining body. Here is an example of what I mean... Such a place for a splash only to bring soap makes the warm water relative- - Einstein's Bathtub And with that, Slattery invites each reader across the threshold of Oceanus, the god of the backward flowing river ocean, to reach the underworld waters flowing in the depths of nowhere. This poetry volume exquisitely renders a mythic and watery alchemy of poetic imagery reaffirming that poetry is "a making craft", and this poet understands deeply the making of images with words in a way that turns words to likeness as the likes of which only a poet can say.
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