It’s a rare reviewer who can capture a book’s soul, not just sum up its
plot, book-report style. A review must bring the work to life —
its themes, its language, even what’s written between the lines — but it
must be done in the reviewer’s unique voice.
For an example of this difficult art at its loveliest, we’re offering up Bruce Black of Wordswimmer,
a writer who really plunges into the deep end of the lagoon to bring us
poetry’s most subtle undercurrents. He recently examined Diane
Siebert’s Tour America, a collection of poems that grew out of her and her husband’s decade motorcycling through the country.
Like a gardener, Siebert planted seeds–Every evening, no matter what, I wrote in my journal—so
that years later the compost heap of memories fed the garden of her
imagination, and the words and images, the thoughts and emotions that
she so carefully tended on her journey blossomed into a remarkable
collection of poems …
Cool stuff, huh? Then he goes on to describe the poems and places:
The collection is filled with our country’s humor, history,
trivia, legends, mysteries and wonders. It’s a map of America’s
treasures–some hidden, some well-known–with each poem crafted with
such skill that readers are able to feel the essence of each place
emanating from somewhere deep inside the poems themselves.
Read the whole thing.