Customer Reviews

How We Came to Stand on That Shore (River City Poetry Series)

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

 

 

While these wonderfully crafted, moving lyrics-stiched-together-to-make-narrative-segments get at much that is sad or falls short or is empty or is imperfect or fails or is betrayed or is incomplete or is some other way hard in one man's particular life, they also affirm the author in his act of experiencing these difficult things. Actually, the book presents many inner acts of the author's coming-to-terms with family members and other intimates and his own history--the givens and the actions of others and the choices he has made--as the author traverses decades in his life. And these inner acts are the poems themselves, which are ruthlessly honest and dense and linguistically various and fundamentally learned and playful and evocative and lovely. (Inner acts that turn out to be experiences the author also generously shares with us, his anonymous intimates.) The carefulness in the poems, the rigorousness of them, the prosodic sophistication of them, the intricacy of them, and the affirmative expectation of them tell us that the way one comes to understand the difficulty in one's life means everything.