Customer Reviews

The Calligraphy Shop

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What I most loved about this book is the mix of poignant, exotic, obscure (occasionally, but worth the trouble) and often very funny. One poem, for example ("Pangur Blah") features the author's struggles with writer's block. He compares himself with his cat, who ("an urban beast, hence unemployed") does "naught but nap and shed and void."
Rhymes and meters are impeccable. In this age of sloppy poetics, this book is a treat.

It's a marvel these days to come upon poems that have sense, sensibility, music, and passion, plus intelligence, all wrapped up in a single package. Downing is unfashionably brilliant, that is, he doesn't subscribe to any of the pieties of the "creative writing" establishment, and he sticks to (was it?) Ezra Pound, who said something like "poetry must be at least as well written as prose." Downing's stuff is delicious.