Customer Reviews

Tactile Values (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A searing book of poems. Honest and rigorous with a sensibility serene enough to listen to the shadows hovering below the surface of words.

A stunning collection. A minor triumph of integrity and grace.

Scott's poems come at you like a great jazz line: at once controlled and extemporized; modulating, surprising, and honest --ever honest. You hear the poems at first reading and again when they repeat in your inner ear.

Mark Scott's words refuse to lie cold and aloof on the page. They rise and fall as inflections of voice, as pulses of action, as currents of feeling that leap across space to encircle the reader in a compelling embrace of memorable imagery, of imaginative memory. Scott takes everything personally - in the welcome sense of making even the abstract, intimate, and the intangible, concrete. These poems involve the reader not as a distanced spectator but as a confidante, a collaborator, a hands-on conspirator in wresting beauty from life's closely observed beasts.

The volume's title describes the poet's project: to touch and be touched (and sometimes to exorcise unwanted touch). Scott's ingenious command of expression relays with palpable force his uncommon perceptions of our common vocations: our journeys through the thickets of love, loss, ambition, disappointment, longing; from the limpidness of childhood to the culpabilities of adulthood. Always, an imprint is scored - and, like the touch of an absent lover, viscerally felt long afterward.