WCU is a great place to buy books. All my favorite authors are there to sign them. One year I had to have Mike Peich box and ship the books I had acquired. This year I limited myself to four books. Hapax, by Alicia. Starr Farm Beach, an unspeakably beautiful and thoughtfully organized chapbook from Peich's Aralia Press by Tim Steele. A Trick of Sunlight, Dick Davis' new offering from Swallow. And Toward the Winter Solstice, also Swallow, Tim's first full length collection in more than a decade. A few comments on each.
Starr Farm Beach might be the best and most lavishly produced work of art from Aralia since Mike produced Bone Key by Dick Wilbur. It is lovingly bound by the same artisan who bound my first chapbook, Bedrock. All of Tim's poems are absolutely top shelf. The chapbook is our entry into book publication, and I commend it to our members as a model of the art.
What to say about Hapax. I have memorized Last Will, Aliki's elegy to her father the dove hunter, and I am reading it to every hunter I know. It is a big, capacious book from a diminutive woman with an utterly distinctive voice. I think it's a significant advance on Archaic Smile, which is a tough act to follow. I'd seen a lot of poems in her little self-published chappie, and in the Aralia work of art, and in journals. My expectations were high but not high enough.
Dick's Trick of Sunlight is a delight. Sage, wit and melancholic, he doesn't repeat himself, and when one embarks on one's seventh decade one is in danger of becoming a parody of one's youthful self. Not a problem for Dick. His poem Persuasions and a poem for young poet CT visiting her Grandma have already wormed their way into my capacious memory. And these two are mere squibs in the Davis corpus. Memorable speech.
I think the book dearest to me is Tim's full length collection. When I first met Wilbur he said "You Tims ought to be in touch." 1994. [Disclosure: all three of these authors have been unfailingly kind to me and my verse.] Tim's program is very different from my own. I try to hit it out of the park in 48 syllables, i.e., the first pitch. With his meticulous powers of observation and mastery of meter, Tim darts RBI's anywhere in the field he chooses. He leads by example, and it is a winning performance.
I hope Spherians will acquire and treasure these books, and I hope you will share with me your own shopping lists.
[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited June 15, 2006).]
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