One of Those Russian Novels - Tapa blanda

Poetry. "The phrase 'Russian novel' suggests thickness, density, and richness. All those terms apply to Cantwell's poetry or, more precisely, to the life in the poems. These are active pieces that plunge into the thick of things and pulse with motion, regardless of whether the setting is past or present. They show as they describe or recollect, and they don't recollect in any apparent tranquility or with regret. 'A late cousin speaks,' walking and talking the life of addiction--the needle, coffee, cannabis, the white rock--that culminates in the recognition of happiness, however sordid, however self-isolating. Old friends reconnect at a convention's hotel bar, last to be seated and staying so far beyond closing that the management gives them an unsubtle hint, 'and yet we linger.' Three poems realize incidents from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a big paragraph of which is this book's epigraph. Poems on the deaths of artists and friends, even when they're very long gone, indeed--see 'Marlowe in Italy'--hail their subjects' follies and vices equally with their achievements. This is poetry teeming with light, darkness, color, movement, heat, cold, sound, and silence. Reading it is like watching a complicated, demanding movie or, in full consciousness, life--Ray Olson, Booklist.

Kevin Cantwell is the author of ONE OF THOSE RUSSIAN NOVELS (What Books Press, 2009) and SOMETHING BLACK IN THE GREEN PART OF YOUR EYE (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2002), and editor at Macon State College of Redbone Chapbooks, which publishes an occasional collection by a Georgia poet who has not yet published a first book. Cantwell's poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Commonweal, Paris Review, and many other journals.