(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...One of the virtues I most admire and assign to my fondest fictional creations is reserve, the kind of reserve that refrains from excessive gregariousness lest it be seen as wanting something. In the 2001 film Gosford Park the screenwriter Julian Fellowes has a certain gentleman admonishing a younger man not to seem ingratiating because [...]
Read More...My days as a high school orator and debater soured me on performed poetry. Maybe growing up among artists had something to do with this bias, too. I trust what I can see. For this reason I don’t attend as many poetry readings as a poet needing to attract readers should. I’m acutely aware of [...]
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