David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 181
March 8, 2017
Between two silences
Disinheritance by John Sibley Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
John Sibley Williams’ collection speaks with a deep melancholy, a pensive thoughtfulness, and a rich heart about our living beside the dead and our own dying. His diction is precise and when he twists the language at all it is because real pain twists us and our speaking. Whether in the predictable tragedies of losing grandparents and parents or the unpredictable and terrible loss of a child, Williams sings elegies of profound simplicity. Even in the birth of a child and the watching it grow through infancy and teething, the knowledge of death is a constant companion that adds poignancy and makes us love with terrible passion:
“Still there is love to be born
from unintended horizons
or shoveled dead into the waves,
weighed down with stars.”
His verse lines often sprawls as if with desperation and no pause of punctuation possible:
“Now when I try to wash my hands of themselves the entire ocean turns red and without resolution my body alone unbuilds the sand.”
He wonders on the consciousness of mortality that may be in the flights of birds or the songs of crickets, even as he knows intuitively our communion with them:
“that birds in time enjoy the tension between eating and being eaten b something larger.”
“We are not so fortunate as cricket legs at dawn.”
Our ultimate silence melded back into the earth and water is our song at last. But Williams here gives us a living song to sing between our two silences.
March 3, 2017
Thank you Allan Peterson for the nice Goodreads review of my chapbook “Finite to Fail”
“Emily Dickinson’s influence and inspirations can be found everywhere in contemporary poetry. Her energetic rhythms and observations on life and reverence for that life, also echo in the chapbook, “Finite to Fail, poems after Dickinson” by Virginia poet David Anthony Sam, from GFT Press.
“Emily’s punctuational dashes, as in the title’s dedicatory poem, are used exclusively by Sam throughout these twenty reflective, almost devotional, lyrics. And whether replying to her well known “I’m nobody! Who are you?” or devising his own reflections under her spell, the poems demonstrate both homage and originality. In short, he “’splits the lark.’”
March 2, 2017
Literature Today Vol. 6 containing my poem “Echoes in Green” is now available
Literature Today Vol. 6 containing my poem “Echoes in Green” is now available here.
March 1, 2017
Thanks to those who purchased copies of my new chapbook. Please review them on Goodreads.
Thanks to those who purchased copies of my new chapbook. Please review them on Goodreads.
February 28, 2017
February 27, 2017
Too many
There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough. -Irwin Shaw
February 19, 2017
A fine collection by Michael Mcgriff
Home Burial by Michael McGriff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Michael McGriff’s fine collection of seemingly autobiographical poems is well-worth spending some time with. Rich in common language and imagery, hand-wrought like the work he alludes to, and filled with imagery from nature and the land he obviously loves, there are times when the emotions seem oevrwrought—but they are rare. Surreal juxtapositions of imagery interrupt the more prosaic narratives to surreal and synaesthesiac effect.
In all there is truth in these poems that try and fail to “explain the wounded alphabet/dragging itself through the groves of ash.”
February 16, 2017
My interview with 2 other authors on the Ted Schubel Show can be heard online.
My interview with 2 other authors on the Ted Schubel Show can be heard online.
