Customer Reviews

ENTER DARK STRANGER

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I must be honest here, and say that I know Bill Trowbridge. I have known him for six or so years. I consider him one of my closest friends. It's not a crime that I'm writing here about his book, is it? Aren't a few of these five star reviews on Amazon from friends and relatives? This is an honest review, or I wouldn't be writing it. I wouldn't be, I'm not making this stuff up. If you love beautiful poetry, if you love irony, if you detest sentimentality, if you want to see into the dark worlds of the disappointed, the fearful, the furious, the patient, a spirit of hope and determination, if you want to recall your own childhood and adolescence, if you want sarcasm and tenderness in the same breath, if you want to smile, if you you love landscape (especially of the Midwest), if you want to know grace and loss as Trowbridge sees it, as you might yourself see it, you should read this book. Especially the Kong poems, especially "The Madness of Kong." It goes like this: I think I see it now: they chase me/because I'm mad, and I'm mad because/they chase me. So said the doctor/when I told him I was kidnapped/from my secret island by movie men/and a tiny blonde in love with screaming,/that I was God and may still be,/that I'm immune to bombs and bullets./He said it would be years before/I'm cured, that Mother is behind it all./When I pinched his head, it made/alittle squeak. Sometimes it's good/to be mad, if you think about it.

Don't you love it?

This is the finest collection of poems since Philip Larkin's HIGH WINDOWS. (Although I've gotta admit that I'm not much of a reader of poetry. Come to think of it, I'm not much of an admirer of poetry. Take a look in those yearly anthologies and you'll see what I mean.)

Almost all of Trowbridge's poems are prose-poems. With none of that corny rhyme-&-meter horsecrap. And my only complaint is that maybe some of these poems should've been formatted in a prose format instead of with the corny line-breaks. Or maybe not. Or maybe Andrew Motion should be thrown off a goddam bridge and replaced by Trowbridge as Poet Laureate of Limeyland. Anything to get Trowbridge more publicity.

One of the things I love about Trowbridge is his empathy. His willingness to impersonate other people. My favorite thing in here is probably WALKING HOME. Where an older-than-dirt Trowbridge is walking around the block in his hometown. And time has rendered him a stranger to his old neighborhood.