Amazon.com Review
Roger Mitchell specializes in the meditation of a memory. More than simply recreating the moment, he holds memory up to daylight's glare, where we can better see the cracks and veins of a moment that has also passed through our own lives. In "Clang" a man in Indiana chops wood, "and like a good life it sings when it's split." In "Driving, Some Used Cars" the unsettling déjà vu of seeing a stranger driving your car parallels the unspoken sense of ownership the speaker feels for his admittedly ephemeral life. Mitchell explains the balance between being at ease and feeling one's full capacity in the delightful "Fantasia, with John Locke." All readers will find something of themselves in Mitchell's craft.
Review
Accident Report
Borrowing Henry
Bowl Of Soup
Cardamom
City Of Back Yards
Clang
Driving, Some Used Cars
Fantasia, With John Locke
Four Hundredth Mile
The Glass On The Table
Loon
Mobile Homes
Music I Knew
North
Old Road
Old Summer
Once Upon A Time
Remember
Rendered World
Return To A Small Town
Rubble
Scaly Flank
Seeing Some Feral Goats
Segments Of Spine
Sneaking Out At Night
Spring Wind
Strong Coffee
What Happens Next
The Word For Everything
Wreck
You're Here
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
He has seen the truth and it is vague--a shadow materializing somewhere in the middle of the mind, of memory, in a half-grasped recognition of something almost illusory and perhaps important and stirring. With a respectable, unpretentious mysticism that can be spooky at the same time it makes us think, Mitchell quiets down, waiting like a hunter for reality to slip between the dark leaves down to the stream for an unguarded moment of water. Bracing these lyric speculations are a fine lot of beautifully invoked images and tones of the natural world at the heart of darkness, reminiscent of Roethke and Merwin. -- Black Water Review, Fall 1997
Mitchell's [attention] moves toward the past, or rather toward what our sense of having a past suggests about any given moment's experience. His sentences circle and curve and suggest the pointlessness of trying to arrive at closure. Sometimes his rhythms remind me of how it was to worry a loose tooth and experience that small vortex of sensation, taste and pain and, oddly, brief satisfaction.
Borrowing Henry
Bowl Of Soup
Cardamom
City Of Back Yards
Clang
Driving, Some Used Cars
Fantasia, With John Locke
Four Hundredth Mile
The Glass On The Table
Loon
Mobile Homes
Music I Knew
North
Old Road
Old Summer
Once Upon A Time
Remember
Rendered World
Return To A Small Town
Rubble
Scaly Flank
Seeing Some Feral Goats
Segments Of Spine
Sneaking Out At Night
Spring Wind
Strong Coffee
What Happens Next
The Word For Everything
Wreck
You're Here
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
He has seen the truth and it is vague--a shadow materializing somewhere in the middle of the mind, of memory, in a half-grasped recognition of something almost illusory and perhaps important and stirring. With a respectable, unpretentious mysticism that can be spooky at the same time it makes us think, Mitchell quiets down, waiting like a hunter for reality to slip between the dark leaves down to the stream for an unguarded moment of water. Bracing these lyric speculations are a fine lot of beautifully invoked images and tones of the natural world at the heart of darkness, reminiscent of Roethke and Merwin. -- Black Water Review, Fall 1997
Mitchell's [attention] moves toward the past, or rather toward what our sense of having a past suggests about any given moment's experience. His sentences circle and curve and suggest the pointlessness of trying to arrive at closure. Sometimes his rhythms remind me of how it was to worry a loose tooth and experience that small vortex of sensation, taste and pain and, oddly, brief satisfaction.
Mitchell's wry humor, already familiar to readers of his many previous books, surfaces frequently in these poems, masterfully so in "Borrowing Henry." Here Mitchell examines a kind of proverbial Thoreau. Consider, the poem invites us, the dedication to the page implied in all those journals and in that life that combined, so nearly fully, writing and walking.
Mitchell's is an intellectually probing quest, and he tells us repeatedly that the work is ongoing. Sometimes the voice is so deadly serious it veers into wildly suggestive parable. Sometimes it is wistful. In either voice, I hear the note of bravery. -- Tar River Poetry, Fall 1997
