Customer Reviews

Fathom

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Philip Brady invites us out of the shallow water, out beyond where we can easily touch bottom, out where the water's deep enough that to know it you must dive.

He's a serious guy in the face of it, but he knows that wit is valuable at all fathoms, and his dark humor illuminates the depths.

I was especially taken with the sequence of "California Sonnets" and the long, astounding poem "The Elsewhere."

Fathom is an anthology of free-verse poetry by Youngstown State University professor and prizewinning poet Philip Brady, addressing events ranging from the September 11th attacks to saying the final farewell to a deceased friend to the wondrous beauty lying dormant in the natural world. The thoughtful stanzas evoke the breadth and depth of the human experience in their resonant and at times sensual flow. "Berkeley": I am thinking of the city of Cata Huyuk, / elder sister of Jericho, nexus / of stone-age trade, shrine of the chthonic / goddess and her fecund, polyandrous / queens. I am pondering the citizens, / innocent of wheels and war, lovers / of cats, skilled in obsidian, / who excarnated their dead for sacred vultures. / As I walk through People's Park watching a suit / angle his head to cradle a cell phone, / I dwell on the ancient metropolis and its fate: / One day without disaster or invasion / the entire population disappeared / as if their souls were carried off by birds.