Customer Reviews

Chess Pieces (Hugh Maclennan Poetry Series)

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Chess and poetry have a long history together. A game based upon a battle metaphor and individual confrontation has a great deal of symbolic material and ideas as a source of poetry. Solway's poems, using the chess imagery as a springboard for a number of observations and images, work quite well. Nothing in this work is the daring gambit that a 19th Century poet might bring to the chess motif, but in poetry, as in chess, the thrill of the unrestrained tactician has largely given way to the quiet, restrained accumulation of minor advantages and arcane theoretical novelties. If Mr. Solway's poems strike one more as the work of a positional Petrosian than a madness-tinged Morphy, the reader does not suffer. The work does not make any bold sacrifices in search of a quick checkmate, but the use of the metaphor to describe family interactions is quietly winning, and ultimately succeeds. This is accessible material, capably written, and I recommend it.