NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
An independent small press poetry review
 JAMES RODERICK BURNS: THE SALESMAN'S SHOES Modern English Tanka Press PO Box 43717 Baltimore MD 21236 USA ISBN 978 0 6151 4396 5 $13.95 email Modern English Tanka Press visit the website of Modern English Tanka Press        Web design by  This page last updated: 14th December 2007. |
JAMES RODERICK BURNS: THE SALESMAN'S SHOES | |
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Seventy-odd observationally-acute tanka, written with a seemingly casual, easy tightness. The best pieces exhibit a bare simplicity of tone and style that achieves an incisiveness of moment and juxtaposition: New boots and a peach— odd that the moment I feel grit beneath my sole is the moment I notice my teeth strike against the stone.Here is another striking example: Moods, fluctuations— sometimes the stack of mailbags by the post room door seems like boiled sweets, other times dogs in a Chinese market.The following piece is about as polished, succinct, sculptured and excellent as you can get: Lighting up a fag and idly scratching his arse in the vast scrap yard's wilderness of metal bones stands unreconstructed man.This is a poet in control of the techniques through which we view what he sees. | ||
| reviewer: Alan Hardy. |