Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Real Men Write Poetry, December 20, 2008
Fans of European 19th century verse, thick with symbolism and multi-syllabic, will find little to love in Dan Sklar's Bicycles, Canoes, Drums. Sklar's poetry could be characterized as American Primitive, clean and bracing as creek water. Like Whitman, Sklar celebrates the mystery and profundity of the everyday. This is "guy" poetry, muscularly chronicling the days and to-do list of the contemporary American male, helplessly and joyfully committed to the challenges of raising a houseful of boys, teaching sleepy-eyed college students, and handling the ignominies of manuscript rejection letters. Sklar's poems tumble and sing with enormously universal appeal.
Reviewed by Lisa Beatman, author of Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor (Ibbetson Street Press 2008).
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Refreshing Thing Review by Hugh Fox, October 3, 2008
The refreshing thing about Sklar's poetry is that it's not that carefully worked-over, avant-garde, conundrum, riddle-twisted work that is less interested in getting across ideas and emotions than puzzling and impressing the reader. Sklar is Mr. Tell-It-As-It-Is. Which he himself is very aware of: "My poems/do not win/poetry awards/because/they are/not poems/at all." ("Wanted," p.54).
Which is not to say that they don't move, touch you, communicate. By getting rid of all the technique games and getting to the human heart of things, Sklar is one of the most successful communicators around: "I just want to clear off my desk,/listen to jazz and write and write/and type and type about things/that are important to me at this/moment like the fact that my son is 17 and in Catamarca,/Argentina for a year learning/tango and violin and..." ("Poetry is Just Not that Important to Me Now," p. 126).
His topics include the inner Thoreau, horses, funerals, war, bicycles, rain, aging,sex, opera, canoes (and the Iroquois), truck accidents....and there's not a poem in this book that you can stop reading once you've read the first line. Unreadable poets should take a course in Sklar, get readable, read Bicycles, Canoes, Drums.
Hugh Fox/Sept 2008
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