Unlike Aliki, my five star ratings have been lost on Deed and VFN, largely thanks to some unknown enemy who posted this on the VFN page:
A Bit Too Far North, February 7, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from El Cajon, CA United States
The poet's first book had some moments of interest. I have to agree with the prior reviewer that things got much weaker as the book progressed: insufficient charge, lack of dynamic, failure to come alive off the page, absence of organic vitality or variety after awhile.
With this collection, the same weaknesses manifest themselves. Much more reminiscent of Robert Francis (hard to find anthologized or cited much anymore), and nowhere near the level of mastery, depth, profundity, multi-layered dimensions of Frost.
Uneven in quality. Some genuinely touching and heartfelt moments; some gravity; some wit. Some original music on occasion. But overall lacking the inspiration and sublime artistry of Wilbur, Hecht, Hardy, Betjeman, Larkin and the magnificent short pieces of Yeats, Auden, Robinson, Housman, de la Mare, Masefield, W. Owen, Sassoon, C. Rossetti, Bogan, Wylie, E. Jennings, Vikram Seth, Tim Steele, Dana Gioia, Heaney, Wordsworth, Blake, Geo. Herbert, Glyn Maxwell.
It is hoped the next collection will provide enough maturing, development, progression, freshness, and elements of what Harold Bloom in his just-out book calls 'Groundbreaking Genius' to rate the poetry higher on the rereadable-memorability scale
I encountered this with some amusement, for I rank Robert Francis just behind Robinson and just ahead of Stevens in my personal pantheon of American poets.
An enemy I made at West Chester? I don't think so. Longman had eighteen professors do peer reviews of our Beowulf. 12 of them said they'd drop the Heaney and adopt our version. The others were just unbelievably hostile, one of them even saying "Longman should not be publishing the Sullivan/Murphy version, because they are viciously anti-feminist, and they are reputed to be homosexuals!" How those two assertions can be contained in the same mind, let alone the same sentence, is beyond me!
Ah well, there's an old joke that the fury of academic disputes are inversely proportional to the triviality of what is at stake. And I thank the many gifted readers and reviewers of my work for their charitable appraisals of same.
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