Customer Reviews

The Charm

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A terrific book of terrific poems! The artful choice and use of the images serve the soft burn of the poet's keeness. Fagan's images are original and authentic. Her poems are musical, refined, and highly sophisticated without being arch. Her vision exuberantly served up with big heaps of clarity. For Fagan, rather than art dull us, it actually serves to take us beyond our schematta of routine... (routine too often inures us to the real valence of our lives). Blake and Virgil keep me keen. Kathy Fagan and Erin Belieu are two more of my all time favorite authors to read! They too are smart. Their poems ranging from good hearted mischief to profound praise. Blake, Virgil, Belieu, and Fagan. Leave it to this poet to take our wakefulness, pick it up, dust it off, and have it resonating again with wonder!

Kathy Fagan's The Charm, is much more materialistic, giving every day objects magic and assigning them to meanings they would not typically have. The magical-realism of simplicity in life seems to be the blueprint for Fagan's poetry. She uses every day objects and pop culture references, to make her meaning fantastical but still very accessible to the reader. Fagan has a very personal tone to her pieces, and some poems go off on small (usually humorous) tangents. However steam of conscious, Fagan uses spacing and punctuation to break up the poem and have it read at the speed and style suiting the particular piece. The poem "Great Poets Steal" deals with the face that imagery is out there for all, and if two poets stumble across the same image and idea, they will each attempt to incorporate it into their work first. It was amusing as it is true to life and presented with a unique twist. Her lists of Haiku's near the end work together, and are further examples of her integration of modern society with an old form of poem.