Next in my Kickstarter bundle was a small pamphlet titled The Fountain, apparently renamed:

a signed & numbered copy of “As The Crow Flies” [2013; ISBN 978-0-9927133-1-7], a 30-page pamphlet of unpublished poems and drawings from David’s RotB sketchbook.

The little book is as described. The bulk of the pamphlet is short poems, most under a page and 1-4 irregular-length stanzas, all in free verse (no stronger meters or organizations), typically on natural themes. There’s a bit of prose. The middle few pages are devoted to miscellaneous drawings, some of which I enjoyed. The verse itself is without a doubt in the vein of academic 20th/21st century free verse; at its best, it can produce striking images and little diamonds, and at its worse it is just words placed wearisomely one after another hinting out sentiments too juvenile to ever be written out plainly. For example, Troupes actually starts the collection with a nice one in “As the Crow Flies”:

A crow rises
like ink unspilling itself
from the pines

Basho would have approved. Once or twice Troupes tries a formalist game; it works well in the case of “At Beckett Street Cemetery”:

I.

The stones are an elaborate deception.
The grass has gone to seed.
The doves are eloquent of your years abroad.
The ivy pours from the trees in genuflection.

II.

The ivy is an elaborate deception.
The stones have gone to seed.
The grass is eloquent of your years abroad.
The doves pour from the trees in genuflection.

The second one, “Excerpt From Waterbody Crossing Table”, does not work at all and I won’t bother quoting it.

Some just end lamely, and whatever moment prompted them flees uncaptured; for example, “At the World Hater’s Cafe”:

Sitting there, Love,
and reading
those foreign papers, it would have been easy
to forget that America
is more than the news about America -
to forget, for instance, just to begin,
the blueberry pancakes,
of which the menu said
you can buy one or two,
though the honest waitress told you
no,
one’s enough,
you won’t finish two.

One gets nothing out of this, and it might as well be prose with the lines messed up. The worst may be the final eponymous poem, “The Fountain”:

Bright blare, fountain-forest,
pearlescent

rooster tails and mothers bending
with their children to play.

The cherries are in and all blossom.
What

life
water has when children want it.

One gets the idea what the collection is like. Overall, when it comes to poetry, my criterion is fairly simple: did I like any of the poems enough to want to copy them out and to memorize them? If there were 1 or 2, that was a good collection, and if there were more, it was a great collection. After reading The Fountain twice, I feel the need to copy none of them, so it was not a good collection for me.