[Maryann Corbett]

While we're looking at reviews, take a look, in the NYTimes book review section, at the short reviews grouped as "Poetry Chronicle." I'm having trouble posting the link, but you'll find there an insightful little review of Bill Coyle's "The God of This World to His Prophet."

Maryann

[Gregory Dowling]

As the article requires registration, and as it's very short, I thought I could help people by pasting it in here:

THE GOD OF THIS WORLD TO HIS PROPHET: Poems. By Bill Coyle. (Ivan R. Dee, $22.50.) Reading “Aubade,” the tiny poem that concludes Coyle’s debut collection, is like witnessing a hole-in-one. It’s a single, flawless stroke: “On a dead street / in a high wall / a wooden gate / I don’t recall / ever seeing open / is today / and I who happen / to pass this way / in passing glimpse / a garden lit / by dark lamps / at the heart of it.” That final period (the cup, so to speak, into which the poem disappears) is the only punctuation. Coyle makes commas unnecessary by breaking the sentence so skillfully across dimeter lines. He also makes those clever alternating full- and off-rhymes seem perfectly inevitable. What ices it, though, is the bracing strangeness of that last image: “lit / by dark lamps.” One suspects that even Coyle, for all his formal control, didn’t see that one coming. If some of the poems that precede “Aubade” seem, by contrast, a little too much under his control, offering the mastery without the mystery, well, there’s a lot to be said for mastery.
ERIC McHENRY

As Maryann says, brief but insightful.

[David Mason]

I loved the book and am praising it at much greater length in the spring issue of The Hudson Review.

[A. E. Stallings]

Hoorah! Kudos--I hope this brings the book many new readers.

[Michael Juster]

He's a star in the making--it's a stunning book.

[Michael Cantor]

It's a wonderful book - well crafted, intelligent, and often slyly humorous in the conversations Bill opens with the reader.