Customer Reviews

New England Primer

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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.

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.