New Review of SEEDED LIGHT

I am happy to report that Yanaguana Literary Review has published a review by Janet McCann of my current collection of poems, Seeded Light. The commentary also contains references to my previous book, Tidal Air.

I am grateful for a number of observations offered in the review, but I am especially pleased to find a detailed focus on “Summer Evening: Truro, 1947,” a poem I included among those I offered in my poetry reading Wednesday evening. The review indicates this work “is really a poem about both what Hopper’s art is and what art is generally.” Indeed, I mentioned during my presentation that I had composed the poem upon reading a biography of Edward Hopper, but I designed the piece to be a metaphor for the overall imaginative artistic process, particularly the way I find it in writing poetry. As McCann’s review states: “Creation for the artist as well as the poet is a mix of observation, abstraction, imagination.”

In addition, I am delighted by the review’s characterization of the works in Seeded Light as “dynamic poems, always moving through a scene, through a life.” I am aware my poems are often labeled descriptive and painterly, terms I treasure, thus I am repeatedly concerned that my pieces also show movement, degrees of physical or emotional development, to avoid becoming static or appearing too sedate.

As I have mentioned in the past, I tend to attempt representations in my poems of contrasting or conflicting forces, subtly positioning opposing elements or emotions for readers to contemplate and find what another reviewer has determined “the beauty of equilibrium”; therefore, I was cheered by McCann’s closing comments in the review: “These poems take readers on very human journeys through translucent landscapes where the world is in some way in balance, or in touch, with what we are. They especially lend themselves to meditative reading, and their gift is a sense of deepened understanding of and participation in the natural world.”

I appreciate this perceptive look at Seeded Light, and I recommend the review to readers.