Reviews

Spring 2013

 

 

 

Living in the Counterpoint
by Michael T. Young

Finishing Line Press, 2012; 23 pages; $12.00
ISBN: 1-59924-870-0/ISBN: 978-1-59924-870-7), paper
http://www.michaeltyoung.com/books.html

Reviewed by Richard Levine

Michael T. Young's Living in the Counterpoint has the distinction, far too uncommon in poetry books, of actually having a clearly guiding theme. Each poem presents a self—contained exploration of living in the counterpoint, and becomes a counterpoint to each subsequent poem. The poems do not look the same, but I found and enjoyed the theme-wise format shared by most of them — imagining for the reader a string of comparisons to an initial image, often of setting and sensibility. Then, just as the engaging and varied comparisons were making me "… wondering if I'd make it home" … along came " … a passage, a theme, a point to it all." I was equally impressed by the sequence of poems that take the reader from the already quoted doubt of returning home — which appears in the first poem — to the book's comforting last line, "… like bells calling me home"; a sort of bookend counterpoint.  Read Review

 

 

The Fado House
by Mary Noonan

Dedalus Press, 2012; 80 pages
ISBN: 9781906614577, paper
http://www.dedaluspress.com/sp/directory/search/noonan

Reviewed by Hilary Sideris

If a book is a house, then Mary Noonan's first book of poems, The Fado House, is one inhabited by ghosts, speakers who are well acquainted with dark nights, lashing rain, and other causes of human suffering, but who return to the human realm to partake and revel in what the earth has to offer—the sensory wonders that fill Noonan's richly textured lyrics. In the title poem, "The Fado House of Argentina Santos" (24), an aging fado singer, or fadista, "opens her throat and ululates/in broken tremolo for the old dreams, for Lisboa/for what was lost." Noonan, too, is a kind of fadista, with a voice full of longing…  Read Review