Customer Reviews

The Persistence of Objects (American Poets Continuum)

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Richard Garcia's new book of poems is unlike any other that that I've read this year. Garcia has always been a powerful and underappreciated poet, with a visionary and mythic imagination and a strange and wonderful combination of lyrical and narrative pleasures. Part of the pleasure of Garcia is how difficult it is to typecast him as a poet, or to predict how a poem will develop. I think this is because although he gives the reader traditional narrative pleasures of plot and character and theme and extraordinary description, he is not a linear poet. This is not to say that he veers off topic, or that he doesn't develop and think the poem through. Rather, he does so in unexpected ways. A number of his poems are structured in a spiral of ever-widening gyres around a topic, which allows his capacious imagination room for endless riffs and swerves. A terrific book. Buy it!