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Water
Robert VanderMolen is a born storyteller. In his narrative poems, it is not uncommon for someone to lose a thread or to lose direction "I lost the progression / Of his tale in the heat, / Watching the dangling / Growth on the tip of his tongue, / Something out of a Hawthorne / Story, a slight worm / As in a mouth of an angler fish." Through his verse, we often seem to enter in the middle of a story — and we always want to know "A man and a woman in a rowboat / On a hazy day, drifting out where the island used to be, / Who would have guessed he would have snapped like that."
VanderMolen says that he observes the world. And while this is no doubt true, it is equally true that he creates the world he portrays in his poems. He is like a guide to a world we know well but can't quite see. And we are grateful for the light — more flashlight than spotlight — that he shines on scenes we would never see without him.
VanderMolen says that he observes the world. And while this is no doubt true, it is equally true that he creates the world he portrays in his poems. He is like a guide to a world we know well but can't quite see. And we are grateful for the light — more flashlight than spotlight — that he shines on scenes we would never see without him.
- GenresPoetry
93 pages, Paperback
First published November 14, 2008
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 11, 2018
Read through this wonderful collection of poems, one I've owned for a decade. So glad I finally took the time. Vandermolen is so good and unique. He has simply lived what's now getting to be a long life over in Grand Rapids, unaffiliated with any institution, quietly publishing his poems in some of the best places in the world, and being kind of ignored by the literary world.
The poems often present themselves as narratives, but quickly dissolve into the pathways of Vandermolen's imagination and memory, trying to refuse nostalgia even as the fragments of memory in them become sharply defined. And he has a startling diction! Just when you think you're being lulled into a certain kind of Midwestern plain-spokenness, Vandermolen releases a word or a phrase that is wonderfully odd yet feels completely right, even if you have to stop and look it up.
And he clearly understands the world and his place in it through the making of poems! Nothing here feels mercenary or written to please anyone but the poet himself. I can't recommend him highly enough.
The poems often present themselves as narratives, but quickly dissolve into the pathways of Vandermolen's imagination and memory, trying to refuse nostalgia even as the fragments of memory in them become sharply defined. And he has a startling diction! Just when you think you're being lulled into a certain kind of Midwestern plain-spokenness, Vandermolen releases a word or a phrase that is wonderfully odd yet feels completely right, even if you have to stop and look it up.
And he clearly understands the world and his place in it through the making of poems! Nothing here feels mercenary or written to please anyone but the poet himself. I can't recommend him highly enough.
Displaying 1 of 1 review