Reviews for Romey's Order

The average rating for Romey's Order based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-25 00:00:00 Aaron Cook Not a huge fan although there's a lot to admire. Riley has brilliant imagery, but which -- maybe because his world is so different from mine -- fail to really connect for me. Take the first poem, "Once upon a time a ditch pipe got left behind behind Azalea Industrial...the boy shook and sheltered in its mouth awhile -- hoo-hoo! hey-O! -- and bent and went on in. It was like a cave but clean. He C-curved his spine against one wall to fit, and humming something, sucked his shirttail". In the next stanza he writes "What the boy called inside-oku called him back. He was hooked right quick on the well-bottom peace of the pumicey concrete and how sounds sounded in there, and re-sounded. Tight-curled as he had to get -- like a cling-shrimp one day, a pill-bug, a bass-clef, a bison's eye; an abalone (ocean-ear!)" There's a ton of self-consciousness of the written verse -- "C-curve", "sounds sounded in there, and re-sounded" -- which I appreciate. The compound word 'inside-oku', oku meaning "interior, deep space" in Japanese, seems to me a brilliant linguistic/cross-cultural import. Spoken aloud, oku has something of the echo of a hollow. "inside-oku" is so very very right to build a sound space of a ditchpipe. Although: Riley's images build and resound -- although, he is a child of two languages and he has the sense of auditory uncanny that comes from this junction, he never, it seems to me, moves beyond cacophony. I want something more than just a vivid -- very vivid, very self-aware -- image of this child. I want to know what all this means, what he thinks & feels as well as what he sees/hears. I want metaphysics beyond mere phenomenon. As such "Romey's Order" feels fundamentally incomplete, more a case study in exotic diction, sound invention, than a complete book of poesie.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-16 00:00:00 Goerge Black A. MAZING.