A Lovely Review of “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer”

Iknow I am late post­ing this to my blog, but I just had to say how hap­py I am with the review of my chap­book, For My Son,  A Kind of Prayer, that Bren­dan Walsh post­ed to his blog a cou­ple of months ago. It’s not just that he said some very nice things about me as a poet and about the poems them­selves. I think I appre­ci­at­ed most was what he said about his own expe­ri­ence of read­ing the book:

 

I found that, while read­ing, I was lin­ger­ing on the ease of lan­guage, and the lack of force­ful­ness in imagery, phrase­ol­o­gy, and struc­ture. At the time of this writ­ing, I’m also digest­ing won­der­ful full-length col­lec­tions by younger poets (Kaveh Akbar, sam sax), and this chap­book does dif­fer­ent things in an unboth­ered way. Not only was I con­sid­er­ing New­man’s ease of lan­guage, but also my own rela­tion­ship to the kind of poet­ry that I write. Read­ing For My Son, A Kind Of Prayer felt like an inward exam­i­na­tion of why I spend so much time in the poet­ic uni­verse.

What­ev­er else may be true about the poems I write, it makes me very hap­py to know that anoth­er poet val­ues them in this way.

All of the poems in For My Son, A Kind of Prayer are in my sec­ond, full-length col­lec­tion, Words for What Those Men Have Done, and so the review is also a kind of intro­duc­tion to that book, which I do hope you will check out.