Customer Reviews

Yes: Irises

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This is a superb chapbook. Even at 24 pages total, it is integrated in theme and image, full of well-chosen and ordered poems. Some poems recall childhood memories of suburban Illinois (Villa Park, a town near Chicago): the old Ovaltine factory, a DuPage county quarry, a local church. Others are more timeless, set in a nursing home or a backyard garden. A sense of disappointment, especially from memories of the "familiar, an echo / we keep riding past," is balanced by the truth and beauty (thank you Keats) of nature, as well as the preservation of what is good about life. These clipped, image-driven poems seem indebted both to haiku minimalism and to the non sequitur style of Stevens. Perception of the beautiful (hence the book's title, as if the author is searching for something to redeem life and finally locates it in a flower) becomes a remedy for things we lose or let go, like a baptism remembered in apostasy. My favorite poem here, "November Chrysanthemums," is also a love poem: "For you, there has never been a bud / not worth waiting for." In "Mulching the Roses, we are told "that even repetitive / things can be exquisite." As is this book.