Customer Reviews

Gilbert and Garbo in Love

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Christopher Conlon's book, Gilbert & Garbo in Love, is an awesome achievement--it's more immediate and powerful than a novel, more absorbing and engaging than a film--which is way beyond where most poems or sequences or collections of poems go in sustained intensity and inspiration. This book should have been a bestseller--atop the N.Y. Times or Washington Post bestseller lists--it's the one that got by the literary watchdogs. Gilbert & Garbo in Love is accessible to an audience that does not read poetry and a tour-de-force for an audience that does. It's a top-rung achievement that should be discovered! It's popular and literary, entertaining us with entertainers, but also mining the movie myths for personal, psychological, social, societal, and moral revelations. The poems are powerful, eloquent, and well-crafted--Conlon explores the innermost thoughts of his movie-idol characters, changing perspectives adeptly and artfully but maintaining the intensity, the focus, the interior drama immediately, effectively, and inescapably. The sequence of poems may have the narrative drive of a novel, but the poet also exhibits the dramatic playwright's knack for finding human situations that take characters and audience or readers to find wrenching revelations in uncomfortable, unlikely, unwelcoming places--new or neglected territories in the psyche. The poems express the charisma, the immortality, the sexiness, and the glamor of the title characters, but reveal at the same time their human anguish, suffering, failings, confusion, and pain. This is not a book for movie buffs--experts in the filmography of Gilbert and Garbo may spot flaws in the historical or biographical details, but the poems convey enough information to convince and carry any other reader--Conlon did his homework but also applies poetic and dramatic license. In sum, Gilbert & Garbo in Love is fascinating and entertaining, insightful and thought-provoking--a "page turner" that nonetheless will have you rereading each poem--a great read that will stay with you--a lasting reward.