Customer Reviews

Genii over Salzburg (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

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I keep coming back to this wonderful book of poetry for its pithiness, its resonance and its constant surprises. Most of all I keep coming back to it for the freshness, tension and remarkable juxtapositions of its polished images. Carl Martin never takes the easy way out, never seems to have had an ordinary thought in his life. This guy is the real deal.

martin's language is for the most part "fresh"--though bordering on bookish, it is unmolested by academia; sometimes, perhaps lacking the rigor of a 'writing program,' it reaches for trite effects. his poetics contain, however, plenty of sufficiently suppressed, passive and alive passion (not too bitterly cynical)--the acute observations and shrewd adjustments of an artfully disturbed, i.e. brilliant mind.