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Easy : Poems

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Breathe easy, these poems will flow like wine over your lips. Flint's last collection before his untimely death in 2001 is as fresh as his first. He writes with a breezy, plainsong style that begs to be spoken and heard. And as I had the privilege of having him as my poetry professor at Georgetown ca 1980, I hear the poems in my head as he would have read them. There is Flint's usual tongue in cheek joking, especially about sex, as in "Monkey House," "Never Again Would Birdsong," "When I Invented the Rose," and "Berkshire Massage Works." My favorite poem is "Easy," the title piece. As a reader of poetry for 25+ years, there aren't too many poems that move me to tears anymore. This is one. How could such a simple poem about domestic nothingness mean so much? It's not merely the subject matter but how Flint says it, the intonation, the word choices, the flow- so easy: He finishes with: "how easy it is, the times like this, when it's simple." Yes, so easy...

I have never been able to say this about any other book: I enjoyed EASY so much that I read it through twice in one sitting. Roland Flint is a writer of great heart who has suffused each of the thirty-seven poems in his new collection with quiet beauty. It is hard not to feel grateful after reading these poems, and most people will most likely also be more aware of the pleasures they take in daily life, the ones they might not readily recognize. In one of the poems in the book's third section, "Strawberries Like Raspberries," Flint describes the delight of eating a perfect pear in such clear detail that I immediately thought of a pear I had recently eaten and wished for another. Flint's language is always lucid, his lines and stanzas crisp like fall leaves, and there is sometimes an autumnal melancholy to his poems, e.g. "After the Spanish Mass with Nena," "Pamela," "Grief November," "Prayer." Others, however, are more celebratory: "Never Again Would Birdsong" and "HaHa" examine the link between laughter and sex, revealing that the two are often closely related. Still others amuse with anecdotes or mild wordplay: "Henry & June the Movie" and "Land of Cotton." This is a collection in which readers will rediscover joy. Praised be Roland Flint! Praised be!

I have never been able to say this about any other book: I enjoyed EASY so much that I read it through twice in one sitting. Roland Flint is a writer of great heart who has infused each of the thirty-seven poems in his new collection with quiet beauty. It is hard not to feel grateful after reading these poems, and most people will also be more aware of the pleasures they take in daily life, the ones they might not readily recognize. In one of the poems in the book's third section, "Strawberries Like Raspberries," Flint describes the delight of eating a perfect pear in such clear detail that I immediately thought of a pear I had recently eaten and wished for another. Flint's language is always lucid, his lines and stanzas crisp like fall leaves, and there is sometimes an autumnal melancholy to his poems, e.g. "After the Spanish Mass with Nena," "Pamela," "Grief November," Again Would Birdsong" and "HaHa" examine the link between laughter and sex, postulating that the two are often closely related. And Movie" and "Land of Cotton." This is a collection in which readers will rediscover joy. Praised be Roland Flint! Praised be

EASY is acclaimed poet Roland Flint's 7th book, and in a career marked by the rare marriage of multiplicity of style with knuckle-busting consistency of vision, this may be his most compelling collection to date. A native of North Dakota, Flint's plainspoken, masterful eloquence informs line after line, carefully measuring the liveliest, smartest, most sensual poetry of our day. He is more than partial to a laugh (see "Monkey House," "Land of Cotton," "Ah, Venus," "HaHa") -- he's stubbornly bent on laughter. His work possesses the cleverness of Roethke, the lyric, ingrained sensitivity to rhythm and occasional rhyme of Wright, the psychodynamic jazz of Matthews, the hard irony of Berryman. And that's merely the beginning. What stands out in poem after poem is the compassionately rendered, unsparing clarity of emotion -- whether of hilarity or piercing loss or both at once -- that without the poem had gone unnoticed, unrescued, unpraised, unredeemed. Take his characteristically precise and moving "Strawberries Like Raspberries," in which the poet recalls a trip to Bulgaria, where he tasted "the genius/ or luck of Bulgarian horticulture," especially in the country's strawberries -- "small, a delicately sweet dark red." He's learned just enough Bulgarian, from a communist text, to misconstrue -- for the varietal name of the fruit itself -- a local friend's comparing these strawberries with raspberries. Later, back in the states, the poet reads of the transition (or translation) from communism to capitalism, of the saddening kinks in the new food distribution chain, regretting all that wasted genius, and concludes: "... for a while, at least,/ the harvest will be only of fruit -- / bitterer than sour cherries --/ of what had been more deeply sown." EASY is replete with such poetry of harvest: in "Little Men Who Come Blindly," fathers reap what they've sown in their children; in "Seasonal, 1991," early spring in Bagdhad, following the Gulf War, brings from military triumph the mortal grief in "a season of heat and winds/ of cholera and typhus;" in "Pamela," adolescent love bears the fruit of enduring loyalty. These are poems ripe with their moments, coming off the page easily, of their own weight. Flint's earthy versatility calls to mind a maple on the plains in October, whose lower limbs still are green, whose middle branches are yellow, and whose upper leaves are orange-red: a single figure for loss, austerity, and an abundance of bright-hard laughter. EASY is a collection you will respect, and thoroughly enjoy in each of its many facets. Roland Flint will make you smarter at heart.