Customer Reviews

Levering Avenue: Poems (Richard Wilbur Award, 1)

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3 star:		(1)
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I expected this collection to be maudlin, melancholy or wistfully reminiscent. WRONG!

This is a marvelous collection of sonnets (a feat in itself) that gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a man whose wife died at an young age, leaving him with two sons to raise. His grief is obvious, but so is his love of life, of his sons and of having and sharing new experiences. His sense of humor endures the hard times. I laughed out loud at the Classified Ad series. My favorite poem is the lighthearted "Canny Shopper".

If you love poetry, even if you don't know that you love poetry, buy this book. It is a beautiful little book. I have now purchased half a dozen for dear friends. Each one has been impressed with my (until now hidden!) literary sense of fine poetry.

I am the father of two daughters, a two- and a four-year-old. Maybe because of that this poem caught my attention recently:

He was so beautiful at four I scarce could look
At him without a kind of squeezing of
My heart, a tugging and a throbbing that took
My breath away, and though we call this love,
I cannot name it that, for so debased
A word cannot approach the flood
Of feeling he awoke in me or taste
The savage surging crisis in my blood.
A child to hold is unlike any other
Investment we can make. A heart grown hoarse
With care is found generally in the mother,
But fathers also yield to nature's force
And feel their hearts torn open and exposed,
More hostage to this care than they supposed.

"Fathers", Robert Daseler


I love Daseler's sonnets, and not just because they are sonnets. It takes guts to write in a form so constrained and weighed down by tradition, but it takes skill to do it well. The verses are creative, too, another plus when writing in a traditional form, and Daseler keeps the language sounding natural, not stilted, and keeps the rhymes interesting as well: "ideas" with "azaleas", "practice" with "cactus". He uses the sonnet like John Donne used it: for contemplating deeply (as opposed to its other established uses--wooing and pining). It is a shame that, so far as I can tell, Daseler hasn't written any more recently.


Zach Hudson
[...]

This book is not out of print. I do not know why you list it that way

Oh, a sonnet sequence - that quintessentially Victorian enterprise and these days, with the revival of form, no longer so surprising. These fly but rarely soar. He rhymes azaleas and ideas, Sonora and Gomorrah, and I love him for that, but I'm not getting the wow factor; Marilyn Hacker churns 'em out, John Gallas starts Star City with a hundred and Stan Smith put his entire family history into the dazzling Family Fortunes - but hey, it's all good