Customer Reviews

Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (American Poets Continuum)

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The devastating force of Waters' imagery remains the most potent technique of his poems. So many of the images resonated within me, I was hard-pressed to find one example, one stanza, or even one poem to speak for this talent. The matchstick girl in "Snow Globe," the teasing arousal of "Snow Cone," the raw energy of "Swamp Rose Mallow," the longing of "Simple Happiness," the crescendoing passions in "Two Baths," the developing anguish in "Airing the Mattress" - in short, Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum itself - draws a sequence of unforgettable images, harmonic and conflicting, into the mind of the reader.

Michael Waters brought together a collection of poems that
brings mixed reviews from me. I didnt really like the
poems that were not written with a narrative style. Many of
them seemed too ambiguous and didnt really keep my
attention as well as I thought they should have. I like poems that are more
straight forward and simple, with a complex meaning deeper
inside (much like a lot of William Blakes work). This is
not Waters style and that is probably why I have these
problems with his book.
Note that I did say that I have mixed reviews for the
book. There were a lot of things that Waters did do that I
really liked. I enjoyed some of his poems simply because of
the topics. Most of the poetry in the poem dealt with sex
in one way or another. His poetry has a very smooth flow
and often times a sexual connotation was thrown in to break
up the reading and re-capture the readers attention (at
least thats what it did for me). I liked the sexual nature
of the poems and how he used this topic to cover such topics
as love lost, a teenager being horny, bathing or even a
metaphor for nature. In one of my favorite pieces, Voyeur,
Waters makes reference to leaving the blind open while
having sex just to add a little thrill to the process.

...their lovemaking self-conscious, a rehearsed
choreography of mouths and genitals
for the imaginary voyeur who quickened their pleasure with
his presence.

He makes the point that just the idea that someone could be
watching is enough to cause arousal.
The author also used the idea of God a lot in the book,
especially at the end. This could of been a resolution of
some sort, but Im not sure. God is seen as an everyday
person just doing his job in poems like Driftwood. Jesus
Christ is even compared to James Brown in Christ at the
Apollo:1962. I like these metaphors because I think that
it keeps the reader into the poem and always looking for the
next clever thought by the poet. These, along with the
intense imagery of body parts in a lot of his poems are the
positives I found in Waters book. However, in a lot of the
poems I felt like the flow became so steady the reader could
become lost in the words that didnt have a lot of
direction. That is why I enjoyed the sexual breaks so much.
While I enjoyed a lot of the poems, the style that Waters
uses is not the one that I particularly prefer.

This book is a disappointing departure from Waters, a poet whose early poems spoke with a tensial strength, but these poems are full of a solipsistic vision that never leaves the patio-- even the historical poems, or poems which should be heartbreaking, rely on an overly cautious formality that just left saying, so ... poem after poem, no investigation into figurative language and its usages, no emotional risk taking. Only control.