Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues

by Robert Pack

Robert Pack's new volume of poetry, "Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues," is a fabulously expanded version of his 1984 book, "Faces in a Single Tree." In each of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her compromised pregnancy; husbands and wives, old and young, reviewing some crisis of their lives together. Combined with these human dramas are the dramas of nature. Pack inherits Robert Frost's sensitivity to the minutiae of spectacle and evolution, the mysteries of God and Darwin's theories. He regards these with humor and compassion. And, perhaps miraculously, but surely most wisely, he does it all within the regulations and beauties of blank verse.Pack has added to his first cycle of monologues some characters who are not necessarily related by blood. Here we find relations of professional intimacy-lawyer and client, doctor and patient. All possible human concerns are excavated in these poems: humans and God, humans and the environment, humans and their most significant others, including pet monkeys and ghosts. All these characters are, of course, the creations of a single mind, that of the author's. In this new book, Pack has included a prologue and epilogue that explain his rationale for such a work of human exploration through fictional invention.

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

Reviews

[K. Spicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no moment like coming to the end of a Robert Pack book: sitting in silence, the book still warm in my hands, my spirit knowing it has experienced something profound, and my logical mind trying desperately to make sense of the experience.

The dramatic monologues in "Composing Voices" were like the intimate whispered confessions of friends and self. They contained all Pack's joy of the natural world but considered how those moments and ways in which we experience nature in its wild form become enmeshed in the messy and heartbreaking and angry and beautiful experience of being human.

I regret my copy was used and didn't include the CD; to hear these read in Pack's voice would have been a treat.