Customer Reviews

Leaving a Shadow (National Poetry Series)

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Heather Allen is one of the most severe cases of poetic repetitiveness I have ever seen. She basically makes poems about water, trees, deer, and fish, and that's it. Yes, there is a hidden world that lies beneath everything we see but do we have to read 50 pages of it??? Another metaphor that she does to death is the whole life is a series of concentric rings and circles deal where everything affects everything else. Ho Hum. She uses the same symbols over and over again with no variation and she doesn't really connect with humanity in her poems. Everything is about Nature. I could have written the same poems sitting at a campfire with a beer and looking around describing the night. I have never seen so limited a poetic vision before. I would go back and count how many times the same exact phrase is used throughout the poems, but it's not worth it. I know poems can act as refrains, but this just feels like laziness in this case. To me, this also makes Denise Levertov, the poet who picked Allen to have her own book, have suspicious credibility in my eyes.