Customer Reviews

Touched By Its Rays

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Reports of poetry's death have been greatly exaggerated. Proof of life arrives afresh in Walter Donway's exquisite new book, Touched By Its Rays. The title is taken from a line in Atlas Shrugged: "...and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays..." These words splash across an opening page of this collection, and you understand immediately that this is a poet who means to aim high.

The poems cover a wide variety of subjects, and have a pleasant quality of unpredictability. He doesn't write the same poem over and over. Each represents some new twist of thought. He doesn't always come to a firm conclusion as a result of his explorations. Sometimes the way a poem ends is not with a statement but with a question. "Just Wondering," for example, is a humorous meditation on the current state of the mind/body debate. Are we merely computers made of meat, as many materialists would have it, or is there something more substantial to the notion of human spirit?

It has been a long time since I enjoyed a new book of poetry this much. Walter Donway has tossed his discus high and far. I can only hope that Touched By Its Rays is seen, and read, by lovers of poetry around the world. And if by chance you only "sort of like" poetry, I recommend it to you as well. Relentlessly intelligent, contemporary in language and topic, Donway brings the music of words boldly up to date for the 21st Century.

This is as good as any book of poetry I've ever read. God! how I hate poetry!

I long for new poetry that IS poetry. Not blank verse, not endless imagery. This is the real deal. Some of Donway's poems moved me deeply; all impressed me. This is pure joy to have discovered.