Sun Under Wood Book

The Cons: A lot of the poems are about nature. Birds. A cat. One way to get me to turn away from a poem is to write about a horse. I don't remember any horses here, but I skimmed through the nature stuff, so one might be roaming around in some verse. The problem is that he's got these great lines, and sometimes I found really moving imagery and diction after forcing myself to continue to read a poem when the first line is about an animal. Also, some of his poems he writes twice, as in, he writes the poem and then offers a second poem entitled Notes on that poem, so really it's two poems. I tended to like the Notes better than the first poem. Finally, he's got a lot of paragraph, long-line, prosey stuff, and it was hard to plow through. He's tricky, though. Some poems he starts with short lined verse and then suddenly switches, and since I was in the midst of it, I had to continue. Tricky, very tricky.

The Pros: "Forty Something" is a short poem, very short, about a woman threatening to stab a lover in the heart if he leaves her. Nice! "Shame: An Aria" may as well be the story of my life. It's funny and dry and sweet and true. The piece on Frida Kahlo is unique and intriguing. "English: An Ode" is wordplay at the pinnacle of poetry. Using other languages, etymology, and polyptoton (fun word! look it up!), Hass creates a melding of language that flaunts his strong grasp of a difficult entity.