From Library Journal
This, one of the five winners of the National Poetry series, was selected by the eminent poet Donald Hall largely because of its sensuous-almost Keatsian-language. Edmunds is a gifted phrasemaker, intensely aware of sounds and smells. He notes "the grating of shovel and pick" outside a church while inside he smells "bees and blood." Edmunds covers a wide cultural terrain in this book: poems are set in places like Taos, Treblinka, Rome, Cairo, and New York City. He writes passionately of love and religion, the two great themes that unify this collection, as seen in such poems as "Bella Roma" (on the church of Santa Maria del Populo) and "Thirteen Years," a powerfully erotic poem on "the salt sea taste" of love. Edmunds's best lines speak in an idiom that is wholly his own. In "The Fire," for instance, he describes the process of writing this way: "The page went deaf/One letter at a time." For all poetry collections.
Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Albatross
Appalachia
Back Home
Bella Roma
The Black Bull
A Boy Is Driving Nails Into The Dirt
Cabin Site Christmas Island, N.s.
Chromo
December 27, 1988
December Frost
Dona Sebastiana
Egypt
El Nino
Farewell
Fever
The Fire
Gaea
Going Out To Look At The Year's First Blossoms
The High Road To Taos: 1. Taos
The High Road To Taos; 2: A Hill Village
The High Road To Taos; 3: The Morada. La Muerte.
The High Road To Taos; 4: El Santuario De Chimayo.
I Have Tried To Find You
Jonathon Lazarus Wright
Lancaster Street
Landing In Cairo
Like A Green Branch
Lunes
Moon,
Nocturne
November
One For The Road
One Look At Creation
Stone,
Thirteen Years
Treblinka
Weathering
White Nights, 1938
Willows Coming Into Leaf
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
Appalachia
Back Home
Bella Roma
The Black Bull
A Boy Is Driving Nails Into The Dirt
Cabin Site Christmas Island, N.s.
Chromo
December 27, 1988
December Frost
Dona Sebastiana
Egypt
El Nino
Farewell
Fever
The Fire
Gaea
Going Out To Look At The Year's First Blossoms
The High Road To Taos: 1. Taos
The High Road To Taos; 2: A Hill Village
The High Road To Taos; 3: The Morada. La Muerte.
The High Road To Taos; 4: El Santuario De Chimayo.
I Have Tried To Find You
Jonathon Lazarus Wright
Lancaster Street
Landing In Cairo
Like A Green Branch
Lunes
Moon,
Nocturne
November
One For The Road
One Look At Creation
Stone,
Thirteen Years
Treblinka
Weathering
White Nights, 1938
Willows Coming Into Leaf
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
