An exceptional poetic trip through an author’s life, loves and intellect.
A remarkable life in verse.
Schwab has had a full life to look back on and transmute into poetry. His book ranges over several subjects, from finding love and growing old, to giraffes and Oscar Wilde. His story begins in high school and spans through his time in the U.S. Navy, in academia and beyond, and touches upon themes that speak to both common and unusual experiences. The poems cover many different periods in his life, even touching on his 60th and 89th birthdays. Schwab’s perspective on American gay life is one that’s increasingly rare—he didn’t come out until he was 26 and didn’t have a relationship until he was 38. The author came of age in a gay culture before the age of AIDS and before meaningful civil rights advances. This experience colored his friendships and love affairs, as well as his poetry. Over the course of the book, he outlines relationships that range from one-night stands to long partnerships, always with a keen eye and a ready sense of humor. There’s more in the book than romance, however; Schwab writes about old friends, world events and historical figures as well. A series of poems on Wilde is particularly tender and showcases Schwab’s affection as well as the Irish author’s art: “No pioneer or fighter for the cause / Directly, à la Ulrichs, Hirschfeld, Ives, / His paradoxes were the subtle knives / He wielded in his battle with the laws.” Although Schwab writes more directly on social themes, his poetry wields words and imagery in a way that can be cutting but always demonstrates his deeply held beliefs. Readers who enjoy autobiographical portraits will have plenty to linger over, as will those particularly interested in the lives of gay men. Those who love poetry for its own sake will also find themselves charmed by this collection, which is frank and, as Schwab says of Liberace after death, “stark naked as uncovered piano strings.”
An exceptional poetic trip through an author’s life, loves and intellect.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496904867
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deftly balanced mélange of word and image to delight both the mind and the eye.
Half poetry, half photography, this new collection is a cannily crafted hybrid.
Olsen’s poetry, which drives her book, is loosely divided into sections built around three themes: light and darkness, love and “blissful surrender.” Pieces of the first appear in “Beauty’s Passing”: “And yet here I now stand, / here in this sliver of time, / watching dark shapes / where gloom pervades / in harrowing fashion.” Much of her verse feels similar—compact, approachable, unpretentious. In other pieces, her lines stretch out and flow, notably in a touching ode to her husband, “On Seeing the Invisible”: “Standing above the fog he surveys the unseen, memories rising up from times past, faint drumbeats bearing messages from uncounted and discounted ancestors.” The telling shift between “uncounted” and “discounted” is both lovely and provocative, and Olsen fills her poetry with such subtle wordplay. This is clever work, but the author is too circumspect to flaunt her talent; she often sneaks wit in at the ends of lines, letting it hit late, when her reader is perhaps less guarded. The “bliss” that infuses the last section of the book is perhaps—or sometimes—the joy of mystical union. Thus, in “Stillness Is Not Silence,” she opens, “When silence descends, / I sink into the sound of stillness, / the symphony of all symphonies, / the universal hum, / God’s voice holding me aloft.” That she engages the spiritual makes sense given her academic training in religious studies. Perhaps the book’s only flaw is the fact that the color photographs she pairs with her poems occasionally overwhelm them. Especially striking is the landscape Olsen matches with “Tall Grasses in the Wind”: A lush hillside meets blinding blue sky in the background, while an enticing waterway bisects the photograph lengthwise. The picture is so pleasant readers might almost forget the poem that accompanies it.
A deftly balanced mélange of word and image to delight both the mind and the eye.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9905328-0-4
Page Count: 121
Publisher: Suncloud Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soaring, visionary verse with Whitmanesque optimism.
A well-ordered, vibrant collection of slightly cerebral, loose sonnet-format and free verse reflections on existentialism, imagination and language.
In this aptly titled collection, Slonimsky (Logician of the Wind, 2012, etc.) explores the tension between the essentialisms governing individual entities—be they human, animal or subatomic particle—and the yearning for sublimation to a purer, more expansive state of being. In “Camel,” a lonely dromedary nurses comfort from the thought that “[t]he freedom in vast solitude / includes shaping one’s self” and so imagines “her body, light / of moon or sun, her movements fire, flames / bequeathed to her by Big Bang.” However, the heavier realities of form and matter reassert themselves every time she “lumbers to be closer” to any other creature entering her enclosure, invariably frightening them away. Humans, too, indulge in existential fantasy before bowing to reality, as in “Commodities Trader”: “You’d rather be a scholar of space / than trade commodities, / though understanding numbers / remains your cure for chaos.” Remedies exist, however. For sheep, who “cannot make a leap like a man can, / embroider, drill a well, or smoke the sky / with jet exhaust,” there are still the “pleasures of the grass” and abiding comprehension for those designed to “love to chew and brood.” And for humans, there is the disorienting but transformative wellspring of self-knowledge—“I feel atoms spinning inside me; / they’re making me dizzy….The spin of atoms is a secret / no human being should be exposed to / except in diagrammed textbooks”—and the unfettered potential of the imagination to forge alternate realities: “The broken branch can’t drink / but if it could, / imagine its delight / two months from now / when April shatters all this snow around it.” Not surprisingly, Slonimsky locates the apogee of these abilities in poetry. Pondering the inception of human language, in the sonnet “Word,” he marvels, “Who knows the moment when language began? / The actual first word, chance or divine— / perhaps from turmoil, frightened cry or whine, or just an exclamation—or oak’s moan / in autumn wind translated with the tongue.” Slonimsky’s insistence on a central, collection-encompassing metaphor and on frequently recurring imagery will test the reader’s patience at times, but the sheer momentum of his tumbling, vigorous lines ultimately proves transformative.
Soaring, visionary verse with Whitmanesque optimism.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1941550014
Page Count: 102
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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