From Publishers Weekly
"In primary light things are clarified; / knowledge is optic and immediate, / so obvious its utterance is commonplace." Wood ( Orbs ), who has also written several nonfiction books on photography, is here most convincing in writing of the commonplace and our ways of perceiving it; his language is primary, precise, and sometimes rollickingly humorous. In "Here in Louisiana" he casts an eye on the comings and goings of cockroaches, and his observations are accurately humid, striking a balance between the gross and the lyric. Similarly, "Shitheads" takes the measure of confident mammon, of men who need "carphone, Rolex, deodorant . . .Masonic handshakes," and who maul "by their appetites." Wood knows them well enough to evokes but not patronize. Trouble comes, though, when rapture intercedes as an emotion and a literary motive: it leads the poet into overwriting that imposes distance between the poetry and the primariness of his experience. In one poem, for instance, Wood describes Maine summer light as "broad and bronzing" in its "lemon pungence, brazen / and honeyed, full as wheat and amber's / wide ranging." By the time these and other qualifying descriptions conclude with the "gloried and lambent joy" that light and time can inspire, the excess seems rococo and several times removed from the eye. This volume is a winner of the 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Prizewinning poetry books often seem to be merely the best things submitted to the judges rather than works of any considerable value. Not so with this 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize recipient. Wood is a fluent, imaginative, charming, intelligent, witty, sensual writer of two- to four-beat, sensibly broken free-verse lines and the occasional regular form. He writes about matters of religious conviction and experience; about the dead, ranging from his father and a friend's son to Allende, Mao, and Freddie Mercury; and, with great love and wonder, about becoming a father at nearly 40, about his small son, and about living out the great romance that is marriage and family making. Best of all, his imagery and the incidents he chooses to report, ponder, satirize, or celebrate are vivid, sometimes sexy, often pop-cultural in reference (never more effectively so than in the first poem here, "The Bitter Part of Heaven," which in some respects seems an outtake from the movie Beetlejuice). If he has an obvious master, it is late Yeats. Ray Olson
