Customer Reviews

The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Whenever I think I don't have any more poems to write, I turn to Joe. He found the rational in the irrational, the sane in the insane. He made everything real. Every normalcy was overturned for me because of him. His need to examine what is right in front of our eyes was extremely... EXTREME. I'm just so sad I never had the opportunity to meet him.

The work is haunting and beautiful. This is an essential book for poets/readers who love the harsh and beautiful light of Raymond Carver or the lyric beauty of classic poetry. A tragedy he's not here to write more. I attended the same MFA program as the writer. He had an affect on the entire program for years.

This is how words should be used. Beautiful. Seductive. Lyrical. Bleak, and underneathh all that, a celebration of (or a yearning for) simplicity. A numinousity emanates from Bolton's work. His verse is intimate, intensely beautiful, whole -- and yes, it will last. He was by far the best of the young poets of his time.

I had the chance to meet Joe the Autumn before his death in a classroom at Western Kentucky University. He had the amazing gift of seducing an entire room with his reading, and helping the rest of us become better poets. Breckenridge County Suite hit the nail so clearly on the head of what it was to grow up in the South, that despite the construction, remains partially frozen in memory. I wonder, mostly for selfish reasons, what greatness he could have achieved were he still alive.

What is so notable about Joe Bolton is the superb level of craft, style and especially intensity - which he wrote by the age of 28. In a style close to, but not mimicking, James Wright, he looked at his place of birth and every place he ever lived (which included Miami, Houston and Tuscon) and drew out all the despair and futility. It is as if his poems soaked all the dread and death and took ownership of it, not simply writing about such subjects, but being them.

I haven't written poetry for a while now. But it's not like the need to speak out subsides when the words do. In this time of drought of mine, Joe Bolton's words are the only one that speak for me so resonantly. Yet what baffles me most is how little in common I share with him. See, I've always assumed that resonance in poetry is based on shared experience, on empathy with the poet's voice, and the ability to project oneself onto their words. I do not come from the South. I'm not even American. I've never been to the South, in fact. And I'm not even straight. Yet what draws so tightly to Bolton's poetry is the most basic and enduring commonality of the human experience: the pain and exaltation of being human, living in time and against it, loving and losing, and losing again; that everpresent tension between what could have been and what is; and the constant battle between our tormenting past and our taunting future. Impeccable!