About book Lawrence Booth's Book Of Visions (2001)
This is one of the most astounding books of poetry I have ever read. From its compelling first words ("Sheepish as a far off echo, Lawrence Booth wades/into the Great Field and the wide-yawning night") to its stunning final image ("Here come the crows!"), this book is sublime. There's not a single wrong note here. The characters, their voices, are so true, so exactly themselves. Though form and style vary from voice to voice and poem to poem, Manning maintains a powerful economy of language throughout - tight, crisp, just enough and never too much. Here as with Bucolics, he wrangles familiar imagery - and even ordinary words - into something extraordinary; for example:"He cloaks himselfin the pheromone of harvest-time.The last hay stuffed in the barn;everything looks like a pumpkin,even the clouds are coming in swollen."(from Act V, Scene IV)Read together, the poems create a riveting momentum, a sense of something about to happen. There is story here, but not in any obvious or contrived way. It really does feel like a book of visions, glimpses into a character and his world.I have seen this book described as Gothic; postmodern; biblical; radical pastoral; Freudian pastoral. All I know is that I read each poem twice, right away - sometimes a third time. I read a number of them aloud to my husband, because sometimes you just can't keep it to yourself.
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