The new voice of a generous, inventive, and lyrical intelligence.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
Ellen Bryant Voigt picked this debut volume for a prize sponsored by the legendary Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and in many ways its a compendium of the styles and themes common among first-time poets these days, from the goofy exhilaration in its title to the aesthetic implied in lines from The Taste of Wild Cherry: Im writing / the scene as it happens, seeking / from light and shadow the permanence of stone. Simics surreal self-indulgence, Wrights wimpy transcendence, Strands coy abstractions: Forhan has sampled from these and other moderns in verse that also pays obligatory homage to Whitman and Ginsberg with self-described howls and yawps. The poets sometimes startling diction and imagery disguise the emptiness and nothingness he celebrates in poem after poemas in the somewhat contrarian An Honest Forest, which describes a place where nothing happens and theres little to witness. Forhan sometimes resorts to childlike rhythms in poems that read like fractured fairy tales (Cracking Open, Ginger Cake), and hes often giddy with lifes little astonishments, as in the banal title poem, with its lame insight, Theres always something. A surprisingly sharp elegy for his father, in which the poet sees himself in the old man, stands out from all the bliss-seeking whimsy and the many lazy poems that pad the volume. Like so many contemporary poets, Forhan distrusts language itself and the fetid stench of words, so you have to wonder why he bothers at all, or whether hes really taken full measure of all his poetic assertions. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Ranges . . . widely . . . sometimes deftly examining the nature of language itself, sometimes turning his focus outward to the natural world, indifferent to language. And sometimes, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, he ponders the endless irony that we are by nature a language-using animal trying to make sense of that indifferent nature . . . The point is not that we must choose either language or nature, but that we live in both." -- Seattle Times -- Seattle Times
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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