Customer Reviews

Three-season Views

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I think this book captures summer on the East Coast so well it is a perfect gift to hosts in summer homes. From the flies to the views of sailboats to the kids at the marine museum to the end of summer as shown by wildflowers, all of this is spelled out in poems by Bob Brooks, with precision, close observation, affection and humor. A fine book.

Black flies don't think anything's funny. Take the Variety store lady who pinned a Ziploc bag filled with water over the doorframe to keep flies out. When asked if it worked she said, Not perfectly. What a buzz! Bob Brooks's Three-season Views creates a still life of Maine's historically brilliant, crisp, stone-dead humor: Didn't you notice there's nothing but old farts at the Harbor Days? I had not.
But it's true, this year
I didn't see that barefoot girl
with the grass-green toenail polish,
though I looked everywhere.
Brooks has given us a fine handbook of rural Maine's linguistic quizzicality.

George V. Van Deventer
Past Executive Director, Live Poets Society

Bob Brooks's poems are tight little snips of a generosity of spirit that gives this chapbook a personality: poems easily related to through short, sassy reminders of our own shared and persnickety human nature. Through his use of language and his undeniable craft, these poems take on a tone that reminds me of my Irish grandmother who sternly said no, while her blue eyes snapped and twinkled. Brooks's poems are peppered with this same kind of wry humor and subtle appreciation for the edgy irony of life. His talented `voice' brings us page after page of modern day Emily Dickinson-like truths that are surprisingly fresh and New England savvy. Three-season Views is poetry full of humor and vivid imagery that makes this an absolutely delightful collection.

Claire Hersom
Author of Drowning: A Poetic Memoir