(Swash, Paul Elisha, The Troy Book Makers, Troy, New York, 60pp, 2009, $11) I heard my stepfather talk about trench warfare as a marksman for the 69th Regiment in World War I. Voices such as his are now silenced, except in the poems of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. Tony Barnstone’s prize-winning [...]
Read More...(Tongue of War, From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, Tony Barnstone, BkMk Press, 125 pp, 2009) Every poem, every story about war is somehow measured in the West against The Iliad. It can’t be helped. The Iliad is that compelling, Homer’s storytelling that memorable. Sometimes it is said The Iliad and The Odyssey are the DNA [...]
Read More...Far From Algiers music Communicators mug language. They may know when to use channel-lock pliers vs. a vise grip, but they lack respect for the word as its own beast, its own household genius. We celebrate communicators like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton because their skills gave them to access to power, but a more [...]
Read More...Bread Alone, Kim Jensen, Syracuse University Press, 2009, Hardcover, 101pp. The trouble with most poetry that addresses contemporary injustice — war, inequality, class, immigration, etc—is that it’s bad or mediocre. I say this as one who in his zombie youth complained that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was mediocre poetry, however just its complaints. I passed those [...]
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