Customer Reviews

Reign of Snakes (Poets, Penguin)

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There are poems in this book that go deeper into that place that poetry can go than the work of any other poet I've read in years. They make a good ache. They make you want what you can't quite imagine. They make you understand something you can't find the words for. But this poet could and did. Some of the poems are strange, but even when they are strange, they make you feel what one critic described as Wrigley's "delicious melancholy." It really is like being under a spell, and it's beautiful.

Nobody sings like this poet. Maybe that's why the book seems so risky and wonderful to me: it seems like most poets these days are trying to write in the language of computer manuals--dull, dry, flat, and boring. Not Wrigley. His poems ring and soar like Mozart. And at the same time they mean something worth hearing. They can break your heart or make you laugh and often leave you speechless. Reign of Snakes is Wrigley's best book so far, the genuine article, a true jewel.

Wrigley is a poet who speaks to all sorts of readers, not just a specialized few. His poems are usually very accessible, but not easy to put into other words, because they are so wonderfully written. Buy this book and read the poem "Conjure." It's as beautiful a love poem as you'll ever fine. Read the long series of poems that give the book its title: scary, exciting, and like all Wrigley's poems, beautiful. Even the italicized poems that are spaced through the book--they are impossible to paraphrase, but they are the kind of poems that make the hair on your neck stand up and chills slide down your spine. I can't wait for this poet's next book.

Anyone that has spent anytime in the great ourdoors, be it hunting, fishing or just observing nature, will find something to identify with in Wrigley's poems. He reaches a part of us long ago forgotten and touches our primitive soul, igniting our memory like the wind whipping at a dying coal. Highly recommended.