PushBack

by Richard L. Rose

With rare integrity of shape and vision, Richard L. Rose offers a journey through the grief and mental static of the current time to a sense of an historical opportunity for "widening the circle of compassion," as Einstein once said. With strong verse whose line breaks, electric diction, and magnetic imagery push the reader from line to line and poem to poem, PushBack takes you from humorous situations like "A Tramp Packs Up Along Pennsylvania Avenue," to speculative fiction like "Bittner Gets a Lift," to the poignant social criticism on immigration policy in "We're full." In the culminating title poem, "PushBack," a continuously inventive narrative, the sustained energy of resistance, criticism, and compassion intensifies, going from scenes of battle, where:

None of the stunned in the dumb stumble
of the not yet dead
staggering in fields of battle
from Bohemia to Yemen,
flies on lips and eyes,
believes that, equitably given,
such wealth of horror is a prize.

to a new place, where,

Soon dark as an unintentional
choice, the pond resolved to space,
as I recall it now,
a spacious interval of placid surface
misted with stars. A loon sang out.
Things need not be this way—
such chopping choices, fear, and fret;
a mind that's hard and set.
Things need not be this way.

PushBack is a rich journey well worth taking.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Hardcover

Published February 15, 2021

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Rose obviously has a strong command of the English language. Each word that was selected in each poem felt very intentional and placed with care. My primary reasoning for the rating comes from the fact that while the writing was quite lyrical, there were parts of it that seemed less focused or more confusing as I was reading. I appreciated the table of resources at the back that provided the context I wanted (and needed), but I do wish that those comments would have been made on the pages with the poems instead of nestled in the back.