Thursday, December 31, 2009

Some love for Meniscus

Dan Wells has pointed out a wee spate of reviews for Shane Neilson's outstanding collection Meniscus. I like that Jennifer Still, in the Free Press review, makes reference to Shane's "unsentimental range of emotion." Ezra Pound, for all his interest in experimentation and innovation, once said that "only emotion endures." Of course, in poetry, emotion of the sort that endures only occurs (for the reader) when the right combination of skill and guts (on the part of writer), not to be mistaken for a simple spill of guts, comes into play--and that combination is on display again and again in Meniscus; it's the brimming surface tension on which Shane's poems stride.

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