Review
Galileo's Banquet, winner of the 1998 Towson University Prize for Literature for a Maryland writer under 40 and 1998 co-winner of the Washington Writers' Publishing House annual competition, is unfashionable in the best sense. It teaches some fine lessons which run counter to how most poetry is being written today. One lesson is the value of "the interesting" as poetic material, the strangely cool energy of an enquiring mind. Another is the power available to the poet who avoids "self expression" in his work (although many of Balbo's poems are deeply personal). And then, by no means lastly (this list could be extended), he handles meter and rhyme as they should be handled, so naturally we almost forget their presence. -- Sam Schmidt, WORDHOUSE
In his first book, Galileo's Banquet, Ned Balbo uses the heavens as a mirror to reflect personal and human misgivings while still making redemption and forgiveness appear possible...Balbo won't let us find futility, not even in the painful excavation of what appears to be his own shrouded adoption...This tone is kept constant throughout the book--in light of the worst, no one is encouraged to stop seeking. While "a black star sharpens and falls," it does not appear to come down on the neck of any unsuspecting person.
...Balbo refuses to progress simply from the heavens to his personal ghosts. He re-expands to a diverse set of material, culled from pop culture, history, art, and the traditions of verse. His agility with forms is complemented by his constant use of questions; we get the sense that these poems are questing themselves in a "banquet of constellations" so vast they can only know some of the answers...
One particularly haunting perspective emerges in "Red Planet": "And in/the shadow of boiling vats, you touch down/on the pitted landscape, quarry scars/and tire tracks, glancing once more/at the horizon--There,/where once a blue gem floated,/and our need was merciless--Yes, there..."
This book speaks from the future as well as the human past, and examines the always "marred" surfaces of the planets and scarred terrain...Balbo occupies a number of voices...From Aristarchos to Dr. Frankenstein's wife, there is a sense of disparate speakers coming together, all under the guidance of the poet. Finally, the voice of these poems, in addition to investigating earthly and heavenly panoramas, always interrogates the inner landscape.
--Melanie Jordan Rack -- Crab Orchard Review
Ned Balbo's poems take place in "cool metallic light" where perception opens onto human possibility. Balbo's telescope is imagination, his lens tenderness.
Given dignity with iambic pentameter and the use of metaphors from astronomy, his poems discover the secrets of a "banquet of constellations" as well as connections between human and natural worlds. For Balbo, the power of sight, agent of imagination, has moral significance. When something is "brought to light," it is transfigured; exploration and poetry are linked.
Objects in space (binary stars, the moon) are juxtaposed with growing up amid dislocations as analysis of the universe and his own life gives purpose to affliction. Multi-faceted keystone figure, inventor of the telescope and watcher of the heavens, Galileo is the archetypal poet, and the lens of a telescope is metaphor for the poet's vision....
If, by astronomical standards, life is a "dark miracle" that the poet cannot comprehend, chiseled delicacy tempers this book of vision. These "restless, skeptical" recollections obtain heightened connotations of the word "behold." -- Frank Allen, POET LORE
