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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unforgettable poems!,
By L. Y. Jones (Montana) - See all my reviews
This review is from: New England Primer (Paperback)
Open this amazing collection and read a poem at random, and I guarantee that the little hairs on the back of your neck will start to rise. Bruce Guernsey's poems are spooky-simple: so clear and accessible in their stripped-down nouns and verbs that you begin to feel safe on his terrain. But then the landscapes darken as Guernsey uses his sharp-edged tool to carve at deeper, unseen realities - aging and death and scary places where "the wind invisibly tosses the branches outside my window, cold and silent." In one startling poem, a yam "can see in the dark like a mole, its eyes the scars from centuries of shovels, tines." More than a few of these poems are about eyes .. owl eyes, fish eyes, seeing-eye dogs, eyes that see and eyes that are blind. Some of Guernsey's poems are lighter -- witty riffs on language itself, such as "The Letter X," which starts with Xerxes cheerily playing the xylophone but turns to the more ominous: "your X is on the phone" and the X "in the assassin's scope." Short, crisp, vivid, pointed, spare; these are distillings of emotions rendered, as the introductory poem called "North" puts it, by verbs that gnaw on nouns until they are all skin and bone.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New England Primer,
This review is from: New England Primer (Paperback)
The poems that make up Bruce Guernsey's NEW ENGLAND PRIMER are crisp and strong and lovely and instructive. The book, aptly named, does indeed serve as a type of primer, each poem a little lesson. Certain of the poems edify in a literal sense, examining as their subjects the nature of peripheral vision, the invention of the telephone, the life of a lighthouse keeper. Others are more clearly instructive through lessons of an individual nature: a daughter builds a snowman, an aging woman burns toast, a man spends an afternoon ice fishing. These beautifully crafted poems -- about pumpkins and long distant calls, fathers and the letter X -- complement and inform each other. The work here is clear and honest and often sad, revealing as it does the elementary nature -- both simple and complex -- of the human experience. Highly recommended.
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