A Casual Guy

In a long, penetrating review of Don Coles' Where We Might Have Been, David Godkin explores the strengths and weakness of Coles's style, which he defines as:

"a poetry that is relaxed, fluid and variable in the way that good prose is fluid and variable, a casualness that is indispensable to good conversation and absolutely central to that peculiarly Oxbridgean sensibility that unfolds from Coles’ longer episodic narratives. Chatty, charming, “offhand” as Margaret Atwood and others ardent fans have put it, Coles poems are not so much pressured from beneath by the urgency of what must be said as preempted by the impulse to charm and subtly provoke his readers."

Poetry as Page Turner

It's not quite a triumphal march, but after nearly a year of hiding in plain sight, Bruce Taylor's selected No End in Strangeness is finally getting some attention. Over at Maisonneuve, David Godkin and Mathew Henderson are both excited by the discovery:

"Above everything, it’s the ease of these poems and Taylor’s style overall that makes him so readable in my view, accomplishing something I wouldn’t have thought possible in the turgidity that makes up so much modern poetry, i.e. poetry as page turner. No End in Strangeness is a book that hits far more often than it misses. A real pleasure to read and easily recommended."

And in a long review for Contemporary Poetry Review, Bill Coyle is similarly wowed:

"[Taylor's poems] combine clarity, subtlety and musicality in a way that leave most of the poet’s contemporaries (he was born in 1960) standing still. A book about entropy and failure, No End in Strangeness is a resounding success."