Customer Reviews

High Water Mark: Prose Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

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In High Watermark Shumate offers insight through wit and humour that is sure to touch each of his readers. As a painter myself, and a Hemingway reader, one of my favorite poems is "What Hemingway learned from Cezanne." He compares the process of the artist and author writing, "You must build a sentence like a mountain...Each piece must be inevitable. Like a scripture you cannot erase..." Shumate's poetry lives up to just this.

The thing about Shumate's poetry is that it is deceptively simple. That is, it reads simply, but both the composition of a good prose poem and the digestion of one are much more complex than first glance would lead a person to believe. There's another review here that mocks the prose poem as a "you too can write poetry" or somesuch. Nothing could be further from the truth. The prose poem is, if anything, even more complex because the poet is required to control things, to set tone and pace, without the use of line breaks and traditional stanzas.

I came across Shumate's work in _Good Poems for Hard Times_ and sought out all that I could find both online and by buying this book. Don't think twice about it, buy this collection and maybe Shumate will make enough money to write about ten more. We could all use more poetry like this.

Buy it already.

High Water Mark paints genuinely refreshing perspectives that are humorous as well as thought provoking. Dave Shumate delicately peels off layers of human circumstance revealing truth and adventure in each poem.

It's pleasing to see an increase in the number of prose poem collections in the past few years, not to say that there haven't been prose poem books published for some time now. While there were a few poems in this collection that I enjoyed, I found overall that Shumate's biggest influence Russel Edson, seems to take over many of the poems and while a sign of influence isn't a bad quality, poets should move ahead on their own, something that doesn't quite happen here. Stronger recent prose poem collections include "The Invisible Bride" By Tony Tost and "You Can Tell The Horse Anything" by Mary Koncell.

Let's be honest: Most poetry in contemporary America is really prose poetry, it just doesn't look that way. Most poems are just a paragraph disemboweled and then strung out down the page -- there seems to be little reason for line breaks and enjambment. Shumate dispenses with the pretense of all that, and he simply tells a quick story or "paints" an arresting image. Fanciful and fun.

Ever wonder how to win a writing prize? Be pompous and earnest and pretend to take chances. Frankly, this is appalling drivel. For instance, what did Hemingway learn from Cezanne? How to build sentences like mountains. There's not a mountainous sentence in all of H. The question might be better put: what did David Shuamate learn from Cezanne? --To write with little dots. Sometimes they make a picture but don't look too close, cause it's mostly just pretend. Or one called Plum. If you get anything out of this besides watching the writer being cute, congratulations to you. It's not unpleasant tossing this chunk out the window and taking an afternoon nap instead of reading it.

The two things I didn't like about this book were the title cover that claimed it won some poetry prize and the inside sheet that said publication was supported by a grant by the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. Why can't poetry exist without prizes and subventions? Why can't it stand on its own two feet? Be its own thing (I almost wrote be its own person)? Truth and beauty succinctly expressed should have not trouble existing independently in this wide world and this marvelous example of beauty and truth should have no trouble either. Every real writer knows how language fails to fully express the things we think and feel. It's like a ship that never quite comes into port, never quite arrives home. And yet, and yet, this collection of great poems comes remarkably close. Bravo! From one world class alcoholic to another: Bravo!