Wolf Face Matt Hart | ISBN : 1-4538-3227-0

Wolf Face

Author: Matt Hart

Publisher: CreateSpace

Publication Date: 24 October, 2010

ISBN: 9781453832271

Pages: 114

Subjects: Poetry

Available as: , Trade Paper, 978-0-9832215-0-0 Trade Paper, 978-1-4538-3227-1

Description:

A record of what it is like to be alive in this world. It is particular to one man, and his dog, his wife, his daughter, his friends, and a little house in Cincinnati in this century, and in being so faithful to the details of an individual existence, in sounding in minor keys, it is able to resonate in major ones. Where you might expect irony, there is intelligent empathy, where most of us would stop at sadness, Matt Hart persists into wonderment. He isn't feeling or noticing anything any of us haven't felt or noticed before. But his spirit might be extra large, more evolved, his armspan more expansive. He isn't blind to the small and large horrors or sadnesses of our time, but he is still choosing to sing. And the whole thing is a song. -Darcie Dennigan

PW Publishers Weekly

Review Source: Publishers Weekly

Review Date: 2010-12-20

"This language isn't anywhere," Hart announces early in his second collection-a statement that proves itself true throughout these punchy and digressive poems. Seeking out the friction that can exist between unrelated images and fragments of language, Hart (Who's Who Vivid) refuses to prohibit his mind from wandering where it pleases, whether it be "...the aegis/ The podiatrist./ The rhinoceros" or "my wife,/ my daughter, the leaders of my country." At his best, Hart coils these tangents so tightly around a focused conflict that one can't help delighting in his quick, darting turns, as in "Ode to Anybody Left Standing," a poem centered on the insistence that "It isn't necessary that life seem meaningful at every turn,/ only that it mean something in the face of you." If these poems can at times seem overdense with these kinds of digressions, they make up for it with their wildly earnest energy and good nature, two things that are increasingly rare in contemporary poetry. Hart writes distinctively from a place where "screaming [is] a new kind of singing." (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.