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My change: a nickel caked with finger grime; two nicked quarters not long for this life, worth more for keeping dead eyes shut than bus fare; a dime, shining in sunshine like a new dime; grubby pennies, one stamped the year of my birth, no brighter than I from 40 years of wear. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Ralph Edson New!
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: Familiar Themes, January 27, 2007 By  Paul Barker (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews    I read "Borrowed Towns" on the drive up to Wisconsin for summer vacation, looking up now and then from the back seat of my family's car to landscapes like the ones that many of Richard Newman's poem's evoke: endless prairies, cornfields, patches of dust with the occasional solitary house or barn. Many of the poems take you to places like these from the poet's past, where he recalls a sex talk with his father, the erosion of a love, or torturing a schoolmate with his friends. In others, he reflects on parenthood, as in a sonnet with my favorite line of the book: "only when we're too tired or strained / to feel it can we truly call it love"; or in the poem "Mowing," which has the image of his daughter on a swing set, launching into the "leafy arms of the trees." Often he records episodes of rural life that are both brutal and bizarre: a teacher who rode to school with a cat impaled on her car's antenna, a neighboring family that borrowed corn from his mother to eat, even though it was really grown for pig feed. A number of his "Monster Sonnets" are reprinted here, too, bringing us a Bigfoot who leaves signs of his presence everywhere but defies detection and a Mothra who knows that even a cherry bomb could "pound" her "back to powder." What is most admirable about the book is how the poet takes care always to communicate naturally, never to mystify needlessly, even as he works in formal verse. He touches on all the familiar themes----guilt, loss, humor, love, pride----in a language as simple as it is profound.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?